https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UVG-5Ln5h0
Mick looks like a dentist after a bad night, Lou looks like a retired butcher, but when the former picks the notes on that Les Paul and the latter opens his pipes...
It's 1981 all over again. AND IT FEELS SO GOOD!
Foreigner never had cred. They burst out of the gate with one of the best rock tracks of all time. I heard it on the radio and drove directly to Music Odyssey on Wilshire, I had to hear it again, and again, and again... I LOVED "Feels Like The First Time," but even though I played the rest of the LP trying to get my money's worth, I never cottoned to it. But there were two more hits on the LP, "Cold As Ice" and "Long, Long Way From Home," the latter of which I enjoyed, as well as "Headknocker," but I did not buy the follow-up LP, which shot lower, right to the groin, with "Hot Blooded." The band was an FM staple, while the format was on its Lee Abrams codified victory lap, before disco came along to muddy the water and it all imploded.
There was a third LP. And to be honest, I love "Head Games" now, it's the holding back, the hesitation, but "Dirty White Boy" shot as low as "Hot Blooded" and the band was positively "B" material, fodder for the uneducated flyover people who never got to hear free-format programming on KROQ, when they still joked they had a helicopter and I was turned on to Deaf School.
But KLOS played "Head Games." But that was when KLOS was the least credible rock station in Los Angeles, funny how it's the last one standing.
But then, after putting out an album a year, the band took time off, took two years, to release an LP with the hitmaker of the day, the best in the business, the titan from "Back In Black," Robert John "Mutt" Lange. We knew who he was, this was a weird twist. Was Foreigner buying insurance, what would the record sound like?
Now on that LP, ultimately entitled "4," there is one of the best rock ballads extant, "Waiting For A Girl Like You," meaningful lyrics with a vast sonic palette behind exquisite changes, ultimately "I Want To Know What Love Is" was bigger, but that was generic, "Waiting For A Girl Like You" was straight from the heart.
And I love "Juke Box Hero." The best Bad Company song Paul Rodgers and Mick Ralphs never wrote.
But the track that was released first, to drum up excitement for the LP, was...
"Urgent."
And Mutt's a master of sound, I'm listening on headphones right now and it's amazing how much is going on, but most people were still listening on the one speaker in the dash of their automobile and what put the track over the top was the sax solo by one Junior Walker, whom every baby boomer knew from his blast from the past, "Shotgun."
And the amazing thing about "Urgent" was its...urgency. These people were not just going through the motions, this was important, they had something to say, a tone lacking from the television singing shows, never there with the shoegazing rock acts, this was a band firing on all cylinders, this was INDELIBLE and UNDENIABLE! It dominated the airwaves, the band went from a second tier ensemble to the main event, they grabbed the brass ring, it all worked.
And then it faded away. Lou went solo, had a couple of hits, Mick produced some records and the tracks of their past faded into the classic rock format.
And then Billy Joel, the ever more rotund fireplug who refuses to put out new music yet has more cred and veritas with every passing year brings this estranged duo onstage at Madison Square Garden...
What inspired him? Sure, there was history from some awards show... Then again, Billy's been prone to this stunting, these shenanigans, he's keeping it interesting, for himself and his audience.
But everybody's too old and over the hill. It's cool in theory, but almost no one delivers. They can't hit the high notes, there's some thirtysomething no-name musician playing the licks offstage and...
This is an audience video, nothing professional, nothing hyped by those involved, there's nothing official. And the sound is imperfect, as is the picture, and Billy starts to talk and you can barely make out what he's got to say and... This is the kind of thing that kids will sit through, but not aged fans and then...
The two of them are wandering on stage, not strutting like they did in the old days, and then Mick Jones starts to pick and...
HOLY SHIT! There's the sound! The one that emanated from the speaker, the one you thought impossible to reproduce. Keith Richards can't reproduce the simple sound and rhythm of "Satisfaction" but this guy who most audience members shrug off, this is not a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame act, after all, they're not as good as Joan Jett, starts picking, he's got the sound, the rhythm, the groove, and you start to smile and tingle, you can't believe it, this magic moment, that roots you, connects you with who you once were and still are and then...
Lou Gramm puts the mic to his lips and it's like he's barely lost a step. He may be peacocking at the speed of molasses, but his voice is high and rich and it's HIM!
And Billy's longtime accompanist Mark Rivera blows his horn and it's like you're looking through a window with your only desire to be closer. It's got more energy than any twenty first century act, and it's just a lark. All you can think is I WANT TO BE THERE, I WANT TO SEE THIS ACT LIVE!
Haven't we burned out on this paradigm? Hasn't every band gotten back together and dashed for cash? And they may look young but their voices and licks are positively torn and frayed.
But not these guys.
And when Gramm and Rivera trade vocal riffs they're having more fun than anybody in the audience, isn't that why everybody got into this way back when, other than the girls, weren't you supposed to enjoy playing, weren't the trappings just that, the penumbra as opposed to the real thing?
"You say it's urgent
So urgent, so oh oh urgent
Just wait and see
How urgent my love can be
It's urgent"
They were wiped away by grunge and pop, classic rock, especially from the corporate era, was to be derided and discarded. Then a septuagenarian songwriter and a sexagenarian singer take the stage and blow everybody else off it, sans production, sans dance steps, sans hard drives, only ability and personality, what a concept.
"But sometimes I wonder as I look in your eyes
Maybe you're thinking of some other guy"
Frustration, the human condition. When songs cut to your soul as opposed to making you feel inadequate.
"But I know, yes I know, how to treat you right
That's why you call me in the middle of the night"
The music makes you powerful. You turn it up and think YOU can win.
And Mick and Lou won Thursday night. Because they know the power of a song, the power of playing, the power of rock and roll.
You see it's URGENT!
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Saturday 13 January 2018
Friday 12 January 2018
Mailbag
From: Siggi Hilmarsson
Subject: siggi's yogurt thank you
Bob,
I am so glad to hear you like our yogurt, thanks for the kind words in your newsletter. Happy we could provide you with an alternative to your beloved coffee yogurt!
I am not sure if it is your thing but would love to send you some fun siggi's swag if appropriate. Just send me an address.
Either way thanks again, and if you are ever in NYC and want to play a game of ping pong while sampling future triple cream products, an oddly delightful combination of activities, just let me know!
My very best,
siggi
siggi hilmarsson | founder & ceo | siggi's dairy
____________________________________________
From: Mike Pinder
Subject: Re: Ray Thomas
Hi Bob,
Thank you for this lovely tribute to my best mate Ray.
Cheers,
Mike
____________________________________________
From: fernando perdomo
Subject: Re: Loneliness
Bob,
My name is Fernando Perdomo. I am the bass player on "Rainbow Ends"
Your kind words about this labor of love is just what I needed to start 2018 right .
A little backstory .. Chris Price who produced it had gotten in touch with Emitt via a mutual friend.. it took years of hanging out with him for Emitt to start showing him song Ideas.. I will never forget the day Chris took me out to lunch and said .."We are making a friggin Emitt Rhodes Record" ..
This has happened a few times in my life.. I produced 5 Andy Pratt Albums and Chris and I produced Linda Perhacs' first album in 44 years (I just co produced a second Linda record with Pat Sansone of Wilco)
As a devotee of Emitt's work I was delighted at the concept of making a record for him .. Emitt played all the instruments on the first 3 albums he made but he insisted on having a band for this one.. so Chris assembled a dream team around Emitt. Jason Falkner and Roger Manning of Jellyfish/Beck. Taylor Locke of Rooney, and Joe Seiders of New Pornogaphers. I had the daunting job of being the first non Emitt Rhodes bass player on an Emitt Rhodes Record. I looked back at the days I would pick out the bass lines from the Dunhill Debut. .I knew the language of his bass playing.. equal parts Paul McCartney/jim Fielder of Blood Sweat and Tears/ and Carol Kaye.
Making the record was not easy.. but it was a total joy to see Emitt Smiling making music again .
Now your enthusiasm is the icing on the cake.
THANK YOU
-Fernando Perdomo
PS Emitt is writing new songs.. album 5 may happen this year!
____________________________________________
From: Andrew Oldham
Subject: Re: Don't Bring Me Down
bob;
george harrison; fuzz guitar? all things must pass but not this one.
harrison gave us many wonders but not the fuzz.
first use i know of is an LA made eddie hodges 1962 45rpm arranged by jack nitzsche and produced by terry melcher. the fuzz player is either billy strange, glen campbell or bassist carole kaye (if there's a nitzsche-ite out there with better data i'd love to know more.) next came frankie laine in 1963 with a mann and weil song "don't make my baby blue" again arranged again by nitzsche and produced by melcher. (the move do a crackin' version of this song on Shazam !)
then came keith with "(i can't get no) Satisfaction" at RCA, courtesy of Jack and a walk down Sunset to a guitar store.
four weeks later the east coast responded with the bob crewe produced "let's hang on" by the four seasons.
bob had heard the stones record a few days after we recorded it when i was in new york mastering at bell sound.
god bless bob .... not enough us do, especially those who decided on how he would be portrayed in " jersey boys ".
and jack nitzsche.... what a divine difference he made in our lives.
thanks ALO
____________________________________________
From: Rubinson David
Subject: Re: Harvey's Tune
Hi
Far be it for me to quibble over credit for things done 50 (!) years ago-
but Grape Jam was the idea of me and MG, and was recorded in late 67/early 68- with Al K and Mike B playing on it.
It gestated from the camaraderie we all shared- Al and MB and others from their bands or friends hanging out together at the Columbia Studios on E51st Street. For me, and I'm sure for the others, this was a way to break out of the limiting and restrictive confines of LP making, and yielded a space and freedom that structured LPs lacked.
Super Session was a great continuation of the concept- and became extremely successful both as a record and promulgating concept.
Thanks very much,
DR
____________________________________________
From: Eric Bazilian
Subject: Re: Mindhunter
The Fincher/Hooters video, I think he had just left Industrial Light & Magic... https://youtu.be/YKy4riaOBMk
It's the song that basically ended our career in the US and opened up Europe for us, go figure.
I've heard a lot from friends here in Sweden about Mindhunter. Got a few days to chill up here in the north, maybe it's time for a good binge.
____________________________________________
From: Michael Urbano
Subject: Re: Mindhunter
In the 80's I played drums in a band called Bourgeois Tagg. Our very first video was directed by David Fincher, it was like his first or second video. Easy going, smart, relaxed person. Very likable and he already had an acute attention to detail.
____________________________________________
From: Terry Walsh
Subject: Re: Graham Parker
Hi Bob,
I grew up with Graham Parker constantly in my high-school aged ears. My friends and I learned that Springsteen recommended GP, so we caught on after "Squeezing Out Sparks". We played his first four albums in heavy rotation and have followed his career ever since.
In 1997 I found Graham online on his own website, answering fans' questions. He answered my general question asking how I might get my band signed by a record label. He did it with such care and wisdom that I knew no one was ghostwriting for him. In essence he said that what happened to him won't happen to me. It was sound advice, but more than that, I had conversed with one of my heroes! I couldn't believe Graham Parker was that accessible.
A few years after that I was shocked to find out that GP plays an under-the-radar solo gig at a downtown Minneapolis bar called Brit's Pub, on their (usually) sun-drenched rooftop lawn. To this date he still plays the show every July. Brit's barely promotes it, and they don't even charge a cover!
I've played in a Van Morrison cover band in Minneapolis for fifteen years now, so I found out who books music for Brit's and pitched us as a cheap option to serve as Graham's backing band. He turned us down initially, but after a few years of maneuvering I eventually got The Belfast Cowboys onto the bill. Graham loves Van Morrison too, so he gave us the green light. Once we'd proved that we knew what we're doing, he surprised us by coming onstage to sing a song. My hands were shaking, but not with fear. That was five years ago.
Over the past few years he's sung "Tupelo Honey" and "Redwood Tree" with our nine-piece band. We also got him to do his own "Heat Treatment" and "White Honey" with us. We still haven't convinced him to do "Fool's Gold", but maybe next year. Yes, it's quite a thrill. This past July I got to talk to him at length about Stiff Records and "Howlin' Wind." He confirmed that I'd misheard a lyric on "Between You and Me". I'd been singing the word "bit" instead of "split" for forty years. It was surreal to hear it directly from the source.
I'm happy to report that Graham's still great, and much more down-to-earth than many artists who have achieved his heights might be.
Terry Walsh
The Belfast Cowboys/St Dominic's Trio
www.belfastcowboys.com
____________________________________________
From: Paul Cantor
Subject: Re: Festival Lineups
Festivals once thrived because they were offering an alternative to what was being celebrated in the mainstream. You went to Coachella or Bonaroo to escape the very things that were being sold to you everywhere else. By going, you were saying: I am this kind of person. In a strange way, those festivals gave its attendees a kind of identity.
Now though, that identity itself is very mainstream, the left and right having moved to the center. Meanwhile, the center itself has become kind of hollow. So, if you're a festival, you've got some problems there, because the very thing that people used to attend for -- that alternative -- is now the same reason why people might be inclined to stay away. Shit, these days, some of the worst people on earth, people you ran away from in high school, are at these festivals. And they're mainstream festivals, don't let anyone lie to you about that.
Ultimately, you can't be too mad about it, because the festivals themselves are businesses, and they've got to survive somehow. There's a lot of competition, and you can only stay so close to your roots before you realize that the roots aren't even the roots anymore, that the roots have grown into this other thing, and you're either growing along with it, or you're getting left behind. Definitely a challenge, towing that line between where it's been, where it's at and where it's going -- but shit, if it was easy it wouldn't be show business.
____________________________________________
From: George Gilbert
Subject: Today's Mailbag
Bob:
First of all, I hope you are able to overcome the medical issues you're confronting as quickly as possible with the least amount of pain. My late father used to say ad nauseum that "when you have your health you have everything". As I got older I began to understand when he was talking about.
I was not only surprised that your "mailbox" today included my email to you about my speaking to Robert Plant at the R&RHOF about Moby Grape (I didn't email you with any expectations; just one music fanatic sharing with another music fanatic) but was laughingly proud to see that you also ran an email from my son Leo Gilbert, who is 22 and a double major (marketing/communications) senior at Tulane. His email could have used a little copy editing but that's besides the point. Is this the first father/son email appearance in your mailbag?
I could say that I'm passing the torch but I passed it years ago. I'll tell you a story about Leo that I think you will appreciate.
Leo was diagnosed in pre-school with a condition called "sensory integration disorder". Children with sensory processing issues can be oversensitive to sights, sounds, textures, flavors, smells and other sensory input. This can make a trip to a toy store or a restaurant an overwhelming experience for them. Other children with sensory processing issues are under - sensitive to information they receive through the senses. This can lead to other problems. Sensory processing issues can impact a child's social skills. It can also cause difficulties in the classroom . We learned that most children grow out of their sensory issues but while they're living with them it's a heavy burden for a child to carry.
And if that wasn't enough for Leo to have to overcome, he also was diagnosed as ADD.
Both my wife's and my head was spinning with this news especially because we didn't know if there were any schools in NYC that would understand how to help him. We did our research (not easy since there was no internet of today then) and brought him to school after school to be interviewed but none seemed to "get" him or be right. We were at our wits end. Then at the last minute we were told about the Gateway School. We scheduled an interview (at that time it was renting space from an Episcopal church on the East side of Manhattan). Right from the start we realized that they not only fully understood Leo's diagnosis but they knew exactly how to educate him to enable him the overcome his physical and learning issues.
We also found out that they had one opening for his year (Kindergarten) and many many applicants. This was a task much more difficult than getting an unknown artist a record deal (something I had been able to do).
As fate would have it, while Leo was being interviewed I read the brochure that detailed the history of the school and saw a name I knew very well - Flom.
It turned out that Jason's older brother Peter was diagnosed with learning issues. This was in early 1964 when learning issues were barely understood and "acting like a boy" was often the explanation for ADD.
Jason's mom Claire knew that Peter was very smart and she was not going have him parked in the NYC public school special ed classroom where he would fester and never achieve his potential. So she did her research and she found a teacher at Columbia University's Teachers College who was the leader in the then pioneering field of learning disability diagnosis and education.
Elizabeth Freidus joined forces with Claire Flom to establish The Gateway School of New York. Their mission and vision w as to teach bright children who had trouble learning how to learn, to educate their families and the professional community about the nature of learning disabilities, and to develop and disseminate effective instructional approaches and programs for students with special needs.
One of the key elements to their approach was a very high student - teacher ratio - a classroom with no more than 9 children and 3 teachers - which assured a one teacher for two students. Small classrooms also meant not many students were admitted and with a very high demand for entry, we were left wondering what could we do to get him in.
Not having the financial resources to buy his way in (which we later found didn't work at Gateway anyway), I made the Hail Mary pass.
Jason and I knew each other - mostly from me shopping him bands in his A&R role at Atlantic (he was just about to start Lava) and we had a cordial relationship but we were by no means close friends. But when you have a young child who has needs you can't personally fix you do anything you can so I reached out to Jason and explained to him that as fate would have it, my son had learning issues and the school his mother founded for his brother was the best (only) school in NYC that could help him. I told him I would be eternally grateful if there was anything he could do to help me get my son in.
Leo was accepted and when I called Jason to thank him he was humble about helping and was glad that everything worked out!! As further confirmation that the Gateway School was the right place for Leo, I subsequently found out that Shel Silverstein was a benefactor!
Soon after Leo started K it was meet-the-teacher time and his class was coordinated by the head K teacher Gillian Ragovoy.
After the meeting ended I asked Ms. Ragovoy if she was related to Jerry Ragovoy. She looked stunned and asked if I knew her dad!! I explained that I didn't but as an obsessive reader of credits I was very familiar with his work as a songwriter and producer. She explained that they had not been in touch for many years - he apparently had left her mom for another woman and Gillian, her mother and her sister felt that they had been abandoned. That was my que to stop kvelling about her dad and I told her I was sorry and left it at that.
That, however, didn't stop me from sharing with 5 year old Leo the fact that his teacher was the daughter of one of the great, now forgotten, songwriters and producers of the 60's. Over the course of his K year and as he got older I played him Jerry's greatest songs - "Time Is On My Side", Piece OF My Heart", "Stay With Me", "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" and some his best productions - Bonnie Raitt, Butterfield Blues Band and others.
After a few years, Ms Ragovoy had a child and reconnected with her dad. This lead to him coming to visit her at school one day. Leo was now 10 and when he got home he was excited to tell me that he met Jerry Ragovoy that afternoon. It turned out that over those years, though Ms Ragovoy was no longer his teacher, since the Gateway School was so small he would see her almost every day and would often tell her that he had heard some of her Dad's songs and how great they were. So on the day that Jerry visited, Gillian wanted him to meet Leo as much as she wanted Leo to meet him. As you might imagine, Jerry was surprised that a 10 year old knew who he was let alone could tell him that he was familiar with some of his greatest compositions.
To say I was envious that Leo got to meet an talk to Jerry Ragovoy is an understatement. The next time I brought Leo to school, I thanked Gillian for introducing Leo to her Dad and she told me that her father was so moved by the fact that a 10 year old knew his work; he told her that perhaps he wasn't going to be forgotten after all!!
I left the school that morning smiling with the feeling that in a small way I had helped Leo perform a Mitzvah and that, though it wasn't consciously planned, I was passing the torch to him!!!!
As one keeper of the flame to another, I think you understand.
Happy Holidays,
George Gilbert
--------------------------------------
George T. Gilbert, LLC
Attorney At Law
____________________________________________
From: Ben Baldwin
Subject: Re: The Michael Wolff Book
If the marketing department for the next Game of Thrones book wasn't thinking about a surprise digital drop of the book with no warning, they are now. And if they aren't, they should!
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--
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Subject: siggi's yogurt thank you
Bob,
I am so glad to hear you like our yogurt, thanks for the kind words in your newsletter. Happy we could provide you with an alternative to your beloved coffee yogurt!
I am not sure if it is your thing but would love to send you some fun siggi's swag if appropriate. Just send me an address.
Either way thanks again, and if you are ever in NYC and want to play a game of ping pong while sampling future triple cream products, an oddly delightful combination of activities, just let me know!
My very best,
siggi
siggi hilmarsson | founder & ceo | siggi's dairy
____________________________________________
From: Mike Pinder
Subject: Re: Ray Thomas
Hi Bob,
Thank you for this lovely tribute to my best mate Ray.
Cheers,
Mike
____________________________________________
From: fernando perdomo
Subject: Re: Loneliness
Bob,
My name is Fernando Perdomo. I am the bass player on "Rainbow Ends"
Your kind words about this labor of love is just what I needed to start 2018 right .
A little backstory .. Chris Price who produced it had gotten in touch with Emitt via a mutual friend.. it took years of hanging out with him for Emitt to start showing him song Ideas.. I will never forget the day Chris took me out to lunch and said .."We are making a friggin Emitt Rhodes Record" ..
This has happened a few times in my life.. I produced 5 Andy Pratt Albums and Chris and I produced Linda Perhacs' first album in 44 years (I just co produced a second Linda record with Pat Sansone of Wilco)
As a devotee of Emitt's work I was delighted at the concept of making a record for him .. Emitt played all the instruments on the first 3 albums he made but he insisted on having a band for this one.. so Chris assembled a dream team around Emitt. Jason Falkner and Roger Manning of Jellyfish/Beck. Taylor Locke of Rooney, and Joe Seiders of New Pornogaphers. I had the daunting job of being the first non Emitt Rhodes bass player on an Emitt Rhodes Record. I looked back at the days I would pick out the bass lines from the Dunhill Debut. .I knew the language of his bass playing.. equal parts Paul McCartney/jim Fielder of Blood Sweat and Tears/ and Carol Kaye.
Making the record was not easy.. but it was a total joy to see Emitt Smiling making music again .
Now your enthusiasm is the icing on the cake.
THANK YOU
-Fernando Perdomo
PS Emitt is writing new songs.. album 5 may happen this year!
____________________________________________
From: Andrew Oldham
Subject: Re: Don't Bring Me Down
bob;
george harrison; fuzz guitar? all things must pass but not this one.
harrison gave us many wonders but not the fuzz.
first use i know of is an LA made eddie hodges 1962 45rpm arranged by jack nitzsche and produced by terry melcher. the fuzz player is either billy strange, glen campbell or bassist carole kaye (if there's a nitzsche-ite out there with better data i'd love to know more.) next came frankie laine in 1963 with a mann and weil song "don't make my baby blue" again arranged again by nitzsche and produced by melcher. (the move do a crackin' version of this song on Shazam !)
then came keith with "(i can't get no) Satisfaction" at RCA, courtesy of Jack and a walk down Sunset to a guitar store.
four weeks later the east coast responded with the bob crewe produced "let's hang on" by the four seasons.
bob had heard the stones record a few days after we recorded it when i was in new york mastering at bell sound.
god bless bob .... not enough us do, especially those who decided on how he would be portrayed in " jersey boys ".
and jack nitzsche.... what a divine difference he made in our lives.
thanks ALO
____________________________________________
From: Rubinson David
Subject: Re: Harvey's Tune
Hi
Far be it for me to quibble over credit for things done 50 (!) years ago-
but Grape Jam was the idea of me and MG, and was recorded in late 67/early 68- with Al K and Mike B playing on it.
It gestated from the camaraderie we all shared- Al and MB and others from their bands or friends hanging out together at the Columbia Studios on E51st Street. For me, and I'm sure for the others, this was a way to break out of the limiting and restrictive confines of LP making, and yielded a space and freedom that structured LPs lacked.
Super Session was a great continuation of the concept- and became extremely successful both as a record and promulgating concept.
Thanks very much,
DR
____________________________________________
From: Eric Bazilian
Subject: Re: Mindhunter
The Fincher/Hooters video, I think he had just left Industrial Light & Magic... https://youtu.be/YKy4riaOBMk
It's the song that basically ended our career in the US and opened up Europe for us, go figure.
I've heard a lot from friends here in Sweden about Mindhunter. Got a few days to chill up here in the north, maybe it's time for a good binge.
____________________________________________
From: Michael Urbano
Subject: Re: Mindhunter
In the 80's I played drums in a band called Bourgeois Tagg. Our very first video was directed by David Fincher, it was like his first or second video. Easy going, smart, relaxed person. Very likable and he already had an acute attention to detail.
____________________________________________
From: Terry Walsh
Subject: Re: Graham Parker
Hi Bob,
I grew up with Graham Parker constantly in my high-school aged ears. My friends and I learned that Springsteen recommended GP, so we caught on after "Squeezing Out Sparks". We played his first four albums in heavy rotation and have followed his career ever since.
In 1997 I found Graham online on his own website, answering fans' questions. He answered my general question asking how I might get my band signed by a record label. He did it with such care and wisdom that I knew no one was ghostwriting for him. In essence he said that what happened to him won't happen to me. It was sound advice, but more than that, I had conversed with one of my heroes! I couldn't believe Graham Parker was that accessible.
A few years after that I was shocked to find out that GP plays an under-the-radar solo gig at a downtown Minneapolis bar called Brit's Pub, on their (usually) sun-drenched rooftop lawn. To this date he still plays the show every July. Brit's barely promotes it, and they don't even charge a cover!
I've played in a Van Morrison cover band in Minneapolis for fifteen years now, so I found out who books music for Brit's and pitched us as a cheap option to serve as Graham's backing band. He turned us down initially, but after a few years of maneuvering I eventually got The Belfast Cowboys onto the bill. Graham loves Van Morrison too, so he gave us the green light. Once we'd proved that we knew what we're doing, he surprised us by coming onstage to sing a song. My hands were shaking, but not with fear. That was five years ago.
Over the past few years he's sung "Tupelo Honey" and "Redwood Tree" with our nine-piece band. We also got him to do his own "Heat Treatment" and "White Honey" with us. We still haven't convinced him to do "Fool's Gold", but maybe next year. Yes, it's quite a thrill. This past July I got to talk to him at length about Stiff Records and "Howlin' Wind." He confirmed that I'd misheard a lyric on "Between You and Me". I'd been singing the word "bit" instead of "split" for forty years. It was surreal to hear it directly from the source.
I'm happy to report that Graham's still great, and much more down-to-earth than many artists who have achieved his heights might be.
Terry Walsh
The Belfast Cowboys/St Dominic's Trio
www.belfastcowboys.com
____________________________________________
From: Paul Cantor
Subject: Re: Festival Lineups
Festivals once thrived because they were offering an alternative to what was being celebrated in the mainstream. You went to Coachella or Bonaroo to escape the very things that were being sold to you everywhere else. By going, you were saying: I am this kind of person. In a strange way, those festivals gave its attendees a kind of identity.
Now though, that identity itself is very mainstream, the left and right having moved to the center. Meanwhile, the center itself has become kind of hollow. So, if you're a festival, you've got some problems there, because the very thing that people used to attend for -- that alternative -- is now the same reason why people might be inclined to stay away. Shit, these days, some of the worst people on earth, people you ran away from in high school, are at these festivals. And they're mainstream festivals, don't let anyone lie to you about that.
Ultimately, you can't be too mad about it, because the festivals themselves are businesses, and they've got to survive somehow. There's a lot of competition, and you can only stay so close to your roots before you realize that the roots aren't even the roots anymore, that the roots have grown into this other thing, and you're either growing along with it, or you're getting left behind. Definitely a challenge, towing that line between where it's been, where it's at and where it's going -- but shit, if it was easy it wouldn't be show business.
____________________________________________
From: George Gilbert
Subject: Today's Mailbag
Bob:
First of all, I hope you are able to overcome the medical issues you're confronting as quickly as possible with the least amount of pain. My late father used to say ad nauseum that "when you have your health you have everything". As I got older I began to understand when he was talking about.
I was not only surprised that your "mailbox" today included my email to you about my speaking to Robert Plant at the R&RHOF about Moby Grape (I didn't email you with any expectations; just one music fanatic sharing with another music fanatic) but was laughingly proud to see that you also ran an email from my son Leo Gilbert, who is 22 and a double major (marketing/communications) senior at Tulane. His email could have used a little copy editing but that's besides the point. Is this the first father/son email appearance in your mailbag?
I could say that I'm passing the torch but I passed it years ago. I'll tell you a story about Leo that I think you will appreciate.
Leo was diagnosed in pre-school with a condition called "sensory integration disorder". Children with sensory processing issues can be oversensitive to sights, sounds, textures, flavors, smells and other sensory input. This can make a trip to a toy store or a restaurant an overwhelming experience for them. Other children with sensory processing issues are under - sensitive to information they receive through the senses. This can lead to other problems. Sensory processing issues can impact a child's social skills. It can also cause difficulties in the classroom . We learned that most children grow out of their sensory issues but while they're living with them it's a heavy burden for a child to carry.
And if that wasn't enough for Leo to have to overcome, he also was diagnosed as ADD.
Both my wife's and my head was spinning with this news especially because we didn't know if there were any schools in NYC that would understand how to help him. We did our research (not easy since there was no internet of today then) and brought him to school after school to be interviewed but none seemed to "get" him or be right. We were at our wits end. Then at the last minute we were told about the Gateway School. We scheduled an interview (at that time it was renting space from an Episcopal church on the East side of Manhattan). Right from the start we realized that they not only fully understood Leo's diagnosis but they knew exactly how to educate him to enable him the overcome his physical and learning issues.
We also found out that they had one opening for his year (Kindergarten) and many many applicants. This was a task much more difficult than getting an unknown artist a record deal (something I had been able to do).
As fate would have it, while Leo was being interviewed I read the brochure that detailed the history of the school and saw a name I knew very well - Flom.
It turned out that Jason's older brother Peter was diagnosed with learning issues. This was in early 1964 when learning issues were barely understood and "acting like a boy" was often the explanation for ADD.
Jason's mom Claire knew that Peter was very smart and she was not going have him parked in the NYC public school special ed classroom where he would fester and never achieve his potential. So she did her research and she found a teacher at Columbia University's Teachers College who was the leader in the then pioneering field of learning disability diagnosis and education.
Elizabeth Freidus joined forces with Claire Flom to establish The Gateway School of New York. Their mission and vision w as to teach bright children who had trouble learning how to learn, to educate their families and the professional community about the nature of learning disabilities, and to develop and disseminate effective instructional approaches and programs for students with special needs.
One of the key elements to their approach was a very high student - teacher ratio - a classroom with no more than 9 children and 3 teachers - which assured a one teacher for two students. Small classrooms also meant not many students were admitted and with a very high demand for entry, we were left wondering what could we do to get him in.
Not having the financial resources to buy his way in (which we later found didn't work at Gateway anyway), I made the Hail Mary pass.
Jason and I knew each other - mostly from me shopping him bands in his A&R role at Atlantic (he was just about to start Lava) and we had a cordial relationship but we were by no means close friends. But when you have a young child who has needs you can't personally fix you do anything you can so I reached out to Jason and explained to him that as fate would have it, my son had learning issues and the school his mother founded for his brother was the best (only) school in NYC that could help him. I told him I would be eternally grateful if there was anything he could do to help me get my son in.
Leo was accepted and when I called Jason to thank him he was humble about helping and was glad that everything worked out!! As further confirmation that the Gateway School was the right place for Leo, I subsequently found out that Shel Silverstein was a benefactor!
Soon after Leo started K it was meet-the-teacher time and his class was coordinated by the head K teacher Gillian Ragovoy.
After the meeting ended I asked Ms. Ragovoy if she was related to Jerry Ragovoy. She looked stunned and asked if I knew her dad!! I explained that I didn't but as an obsessive reader of credits I was very familiar with his work as a songwriter and producer. She explained that they had not been in touch for many years - he apparently had left her mom for another woman and Gillian, her mother and her sister felt that they had been abandoned. That was my que to stop kvelling about her dad and I told her I was sorry and left it at that.
That, however, didn't stop me from sharing with 5 year old Leo the fact that his teacher was the daughter of one of the great, now forgotten, songwriters and producers of the 60's. Over the course of his K year and as he got older I played him Jerry's greatest songs - "Time Is On My Side", Piece OF My Heart", "Stay With Me", "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" and some his best productions - Bonnie Raitt, Butterfield Blues Band and others.
After a few years, Ms Ragovoy had a child and reconnected with her dad. This lead to him coming to visit her at school one day. Leo was now 10 and when he got home he was excited to tell me that he met Jerry Ragovoy that afternoon. It turned out that over those years, though Ms Ragovoy was no longer his teacher, since the Gateway School was so small he would see her almost every day and would often tell her that he had heard some of her Dad's songs and how great they were. So on the day that Jerry visited, Gillian wanted him to meet Leo as much as she wanted Leo to meet him. As you might imagine, Jerry was surprised that a 10 year old knew who he was let alone could tell him that he was familiar with some of his greatest compositions.
To say I was envious that Leo got to meet an talk to Jerry Ragovoy is an understatement. The next time I brought Leo to school, I thanked Gillian for introducing Leo to her Dad and she told me that her father was so moved by the fact that a 10 year old knew his work; he told her that perhaps he wasn't going to be forgotten after all!!
I left the school that morning smiling with the feeling that in a small way I had helped Leo perform a Mitzvah and that, though it wasn't consciously planned, I was passing the torch to him!!!!
As one keeper of the flame to another, I think you understand.
Happy Holidays,
George Gilbert
--------------------------------------
George T. Gilbert, LLC
Attorney At Law
____________________________________________
From: Ben Baldwin
Subject: Re: The Michael Wolff Book
If the marketing department for the next Game of Thrones book wasn't thinking about a surprise digital drop of the book with no warning, they are now. And if they aren't, they should!
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Thursday 11 January 2018
LL Cool J At The Kennedy Center Honors
In case you missed it, I thought you might dig this. I helped put together the segment for the Kennedy Center Honors last month honoring LL Cool J. It was the 1st time a Hip Hop artist has ever been recognized there. Thought you might dig the power of real DJing and MCing, live with no overdubs, like it was meant to be done.
https://youtu.be/4sY1JNxKHbo
Heal up, my brother.
Peace,
DJ Z-Trip
_______________
Now I know Z-Trip. We've hung in Vail. He does gigs and rides, what could be better? He's enthusiastic without airs and he told me all about his collaboration with LL Cool J and I figured I'd better watch this clip before I get back to him and...
WHEW! Where was the press on this?
It starts off with Questlove. I love Ahmir as much as the next guy, but he's become the black Dave Grohl, the one the media continually trot out when the scope needs to be broadened, when there are other deserving individuals involved. Questlove's got cred, this is no diss on him personally, it's just that when I see him my eyes start to glaze over.
Although in this case, he seems to be testifying from his heart, saying important things, but it is an awards show, we're used to superlatives.
And then...
My ears bug out when Z-Trip is introduced by the man at 1:45 and an energy starts exploding from the stage like a late night party and he implores the audience to put their hands in the air and every one of the honorees other than nonagenarian Norman Lear does so and Busta Rhymes and Spliff Star hit the stage and...
You shouldn't call it a comeback.
We've got rhythm, we've got power, we've got Babyface nodding his head, all the people of color in the audience are in the groove, evidencing soul, locked in.
Meanwhile, the people down front are too startled to even rattle their jewelry. It's like "Springtime For Hitler" in "The Producers."
Meanwhile, Gloria Estefan falls right in.
There's dancing in the aisle, there are eyes closed in reverie and it ain't radically different from the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Decades of hip-hop compressed into one triumphant victory lap that got no press because we live in a delusional racist country where the whites control the media but the blacks control the culture.
I don't care if you hate hip-hop, I don't care if you've never heard the songs, there's a palpable energy that cannot be denied. You're not repelled, you just want to get CLOSER!
Now you get the memo. While you're home watching Netflix there's an entire generation that needs to leave to go party, to be with their brethren, to feel the vibe. They're drawn to the sound, the tribal drum, to the truth evidenced in the lyrics, you realize immediately why rock is dead and hip-hop dominates, it's hot, it's alive, and it's about the MOMENT!
That's what this clip is, a moment.
And by time Black Thought finishes so many in attendance have been infected, the aged white people are putting their hands in the air. You see you get carried along, as the entire younger generation has been with hip-hop.
And then DMC hits the state and you're swirling your head to the music, you can't help it, even Caroline Kennedy.
Meanwhile, LL is rapping in his box, he's in his moment, whereas most honorees are usually passive, taking it all in, but he's ENJOYING HIMSELF!
Ain't that what it's all about, ain't that how hip-hop started? With parties in the neighborhood?
And isn't that Lesley Stahl at the end totally down?
And speaking of up, the believers stand in an ovation and then the minions rise along, because they don't want to be left behind, never mind pass judgment, the train has left the station and they realize they've got to get on.
Do you?
That's the interesting thing about music. It keeps going forward. Hip-hop has infected country. It used to be in rock, before that format imploded. You see it's about energy and creativity and...
The sound of the streets.
You remember the streets, don't you? Where you're a nobody other than your personality and your clothes? Where you laugh and struggle to get ahead, knowing it's a long way to where you want to go?
These deejays and MCs didn't know they were gonna be superstars. They did it for the love. Meanwhile, the white people, or most of them, isn't it fascinating that DMC is wearing a Beastie Boys t-shirt, are so busy jumping through rote hoops that they miss the memo. The best and the brightest are pushing paper at Goldman Sachs, all the creativity has been beaten out of them, but these people married to the beat, they're triumphing.
All these people who cannot get a break. Who are put down constantly. The true "deplorables" of society. The ones winked at on Fox and in Charlottesville. The ones whose lives are constantly criticized as we lock 'em up in jail for drug offenses... They're the ones driving our culture, just ask your kids.
This video is 9 minutes of pleasure.
But you don't know what to do with it. It's easier just to dismiss it.
But no longer.
Z-Trip and his crew rocked the bells.
And these same people are gonna rock your house.
Including the one in D.C. with the representatives.
That's the power of hip-hop!
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https://youtu.be/4sY1JNxKHbo
Heal up, my brother.
Peace,
DJ Z-Trip
_______________
Now I know Z-Trip. We've hung in Vail. He does gigs and rides, what could be better? He's enthusiastic without airs and he told me all about his collaboration with LL Cool J and I figured I'd better watch this clip before I get back to him and...
WHEW! Where was the press on this?
It starts off with Questlove. I love Ahmir as much as the next guy, but he's become the black Dave Grohl, the one the media continually trot out when the scope needs to be broadened, when there are other deserving individuals involved. Questlove's got cred, this is no diss on him personally, it's just that when I see him my eyes start to glaze over.
Although in this case, he seems to be testifying from his heart, saying important things, but it is an awards show, we're used to superlatives.
And then...
My ears bug out when Z-Trip is introduced by the man at 1:45 and an energy starts exploding from the stage like a late night party and he implores the audience to put their hands in the air and every one of the honorees other than nonagenarian Norman Lear does so and Busta Rhymes and Spliff Star hit the stage and...
You shouldn't call it a comeback.
We've got rhythm, we've got power, we've got Babyface nodding his head, all the people of color in the audience are in the groove, evidencing soul, locked in.
Meanwhile, the people down front are too startled to even rattle their jewelry. It's like "Springtime For Hitler" in "The Producers."
Meanwhile, Gloria Estefan falls right in.
There's dancing in the aisle, there are eyes closed in reverie and it ain't radically different from the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Decades of hip-hop compressed into one triumphant victory lap that got no press because we live in a delusional racist country where the whites control the media but the blacks control the culture.
I don't care if you hate hip-hop, I don't care if you've never heard the songs, there's a palpable energy that cannot be denied. You're not repelled, you just want to get CLOSER!
Now you get the memo. While you're home watching Netflix there's an entire generation that needs to leave to go party, to be with their brethren, to feel the vibe. They're drawn to the sound, the tribal drum, to the truth evidenced in the lyrics, you realize immediately why rock is dead and hip-hop dominates, it's hot, it's alive, and it's about the MOMENT!
That's what this clip is, a moment.
And by time Black Thought finishes so many in attendance have been infected, the aged white people are putting their hands in the air. You see you get carried along, as the entire younger generation has been with hip-hop.
And then DMC hits the state and you're swirling your head to the music, you can't help it, even Caroline Kennedy.
Meanwhile, LL is rapping in his box, he's in his moment, whereas most honorees are usually passive, taking it all in, but he's ENJOYING HIMSELF!
Ain't that what it's all about, ain't that how hip-hop started? With parties in the neighborhood?
And isn't that Lesley Stahl at the end totally down?
And speaking of up, the believers stand in an ovation and then the minions rise along, because they don't want to be left behind, never mind pass judgment, the train has left the station and they realize they've got to get on.
Do you?
That's the interesting thing about music. It keeps going forward. Hip-hop has infected country. It used to be in rock, before that format imploded. You see it's about energy and creativity and...
The sound of the streets.
You remember the streets, don't you? Where you're a nobody other than your personality and your clothes? Where you laugh and struggle to get ahead, knowing it's a long way to where you want to go?
These deejays and MCs didn't know they were gonna be superstars. They did it for the love. Meanwhile, the white people, or most of them, isn't it fascinating that DMC is wearing a Beastie Boys t-shirt, are so busy jumping through rote hoops that they miss the memo. The best and the brightest are pushing paper at Goldman Sachs, all the creativity has been beaten out of them, but these people married to the beat, they're triumphing.
All these people who cannot get a break. Who are put down constantly. The true "deplorables" of society. The ones winked at on Fox and in Charlottesville. The ones whose lives are constantly criticized as we lock 'em up in jail for drug offenses... They're the ones driving our culture, just ask your kids.
This video is 9 minutes of pleasure.
But you don't know what to do with it. It's easier just to dismiss it.
But no longer.
Z-Trip and his crew rocked the bells.
And these same people are gonna rock your house.
Including the one in D.C. with the representatives.
That's the power of hip-hop!
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Wednesday 10 January 2018
Ray Thomas
http://spoti.fi/2AOiFp2
We listened to "Days Of Future Passed" on the drive to college. It was one of, if not the only, albums my father could tolerate, a man who was a huge music fan who never cottoned to rock and roll.
It was not like today, when hip-hop bears little resemblance to what came before, other than the borrowing of a riff, although that era is past, we all grew up with classical music and show tunes and had a soft spot in our heart for them.
And speaking of that soft spot, I don't think the Moody Blues could make it today. Because they filled a niche that no longer exists. One wherein you sat in your bedroom alone, disconnected from a world that was oftentimes unsatisfying, and basked in this mellifluous sound. Now everybody's networked and connected, no one is really that out there, and if you are, you're put down, whereas that was our link back then, we were alienated outsiders, now everybody wants to be an insider and even nerds are trumpeted, but not back then.
We all knew "Go Now," the Denny Laine-sung song that flew up the chart that still works today.
"We've already said goodbye"
Sounds so quaint now, but it wasn't back then, then it was dark and meaningful, like life. The truth is people haven't changed, despite protestations by so-called winners and social networking preeners, people have no clue, they're feeling it out as they go along, faking it until they make it. And this experimentation and ethos used to be embodied in music, which is why rock became so big, but Reagan legitimized greed and MTV made everybody a visual star and...
It was never quite the same again.
There was no London Festival Orchestra, just a made-up name, but that does not mean people did not embrace "Days Of Future Passed," it featured two instant smashes, even though it took years for "Nights In White Satin" to become ubiquitous, but I always preferred "Tuesday Afternoon," speaking of haunting, this is why I lay on my bed and listened to music incessantly, the sound was rich, a magic carpet that carried you away to a better place, if people could make this music I wanted to get on board.
And on that album, two songs were written and sung by Ray Thomas, "Another Morning" and "Twilight Time." "Another Time" was straight out of "Peter and the Wolf," we knew this sound, now it was filtered into a new generation. My father would sit in the front seat as the sound emanated from the Norelco cassette deck, the one in my hand, not in the dash, and nod his head and sing along, what more could you ask for, that was nearly the entire extent of our father/son bonding.
And Thomas's "Twilight Time" represented the magic hour well, it was after the brightness of the day.
But the next Moodys album I purchased was "On The Threshold Of A Dream."
After breaking through the Moody Blues went on their own hejira, in their own direction, there were opuses with no singles and you either were a member of the club or you were not, and in that era if you didn't buy the albums you were not, you just heard about them via clued-in friends.
"On The Threshold Of A Dream" had a gatefold cover and a lyric sheet and I'd lie on the floor and listen and read and the track I liked most was "Send Me No Wine," and "Never Comes The Day" almost as much, but the song that creeped me out, that affected me the most, was "Dear Diary." This was before blogs, when people still did that, write in diaries. And the track was melancholy and weird and all together different from the rest of the record. I had to know more, that's when I read about Ray Thomas, with his moustache and flute, was he really in this band? Yes, he was, FROM THE VERY BEGINNING!
And there was an almost equally bizarre song on the second side by Thomas, "Lazy Day." This music was made in a vacuum, sans influences, it cared not a whit whether you were involved or not, you could open the door and enter its universe or not.
But if you did...
And just before I went to college for the very first time, the Moodys released their breakthrough LP, "A Question Of Balance." In retrospect, it was the weakest of the Hayward/Lodge era to that point, but the title cut was a radio smash, finally. But its best song was a Thomas composition, "And The Tide Rushes In." He was a master of this meaningful mood, this was less strange than his compositions on "On The Threshold Of A Dream," but still maintained that mood.
"You keep looking for someone
To tell your troubles to"
Isn't that what we're all looking for? So simple, yet so right.
And now I was in college, ensconced on the third floor of Hepburn Hall, all boys, just before the advent of coed dorms. And during winter term, right now, January of '71, I made friends with the stoner crowd, when that was people who imbibed instead of talked slowly and were out of it, and we'd meet every evening in Dave McCormick's room on the second floor and...
Dave had the missing albums, "In Search of the Lost Chord' and "To Our Children's Children's Children."
In retrospect, it's all about "In Search of the Lost Chord." It had little traction upon its release in '68, but it was a whole concept that once hooked you were completely engrossed by. Ultimately, John Lodge's "Ride My See-Saw" gained ubiquity, upon which Thomas contributed vocals, all members of the group but the drummer, Graeme Edge, did, but the key cut on the entire LP was something entitled "Legend of a Mind."
"Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, he's outside looking in"
Now you've got to picture it. We're a group of teenagers sitting in an overheated room in sub-freezing weather high on dope with the zilch dripping down and this six and a half minute opus was the soundtrack. The threshold to acceptance was barely there, and once you were enraptured you were taken away via the movements, singing "Timothy Leary," drifting along with the music when dope was still used mostly to aid your understanding and appreciation of the music. This is one of those cuts I think the younger generation would cotton to if they just heard it. It makes no reference to the top forty, it's in its own world, and when it hits the instrumental and surfs the zeitgeist you're flying above the earth, twisting and turning along with it, back when music wasn't in your face but in your pocket, a magical elixir that could change your life, no wonder we all followed it into this business.
Thomas also had another winner on "In Search of the Lost Chord," fans all know "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume."
"We're all looking for someone"
Now everybody tells us they have the answers, but back then the musicians did not, which drew us ever closer to them. They understood the game better than we did, we were jumping through the hoops of school, they'd jettisoned the system for an alternative world, the idea of selling out to the corporation was anathema, after all...
"I've still not found what I'm looking for"
"To Our Children's Children's Children" is a forgotten masterpiece, incredibly solid, sans hits, but you can play it from beginning to end without lifting the needle and when you do it's a revelation. I love "Candle Of Life," it's probably my favorite on the LP, no one does this anymore, meaningful without being sappy, especially a song that's not a single.
"Something you can't hide
Says you're lonely"
And we were. There was no Tinder, no dating apps, we went out to bars and clubs and were ignored, all we had to get us through were our records.
But the song that I think of when I think of "To Our Children's Children's Children" is Thomas's "Eternity Road."
"Traveling eternity road
What will you find there
Carrying your heavy load
Searching to find a piece of mind"
We were searching, that was what the sixties and seventies were all about. Today life is too harsh, people play it safe, otherwise you can't make it.
Thomas also wrote and sang "Floating" on "To Our Children's Children's Children," another solid track on a solid album.
Ultimately, Thomas wrote and sang "Our Guessing Game" and "Nice To Be Here" on 71's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," but the bloom was off the rose, they were completely serviceable, the latter better than that, but now it wasn't so much about the albums but the hits, and Justin Hayward had one in "The Story In Your Eyes," it eclipsed the rest of the record.
And "Seventh Sojourn" continued this paradigm. There was a modest hit, "Isn't Life Strange" and an even bigger one, "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)," which the Moody Blues really were not, they were their own paradigm, and not exactly filler, but nothing as magical as what had come before. Thomas's "For My Lady" was one of the strongest tracks on the LP, but I can't say that I played it incessantly.
And then I stopped, just as they did. They realized it was over, the well had run dry, and the band broke up and didn't reunite until '78 with "Octave." I was done, but I still listened to the old records, they were burned into my brain.
And now Ray Thomas is dead.
Pinder left the band long ago.
Thomas stopped touring around the millennium. And Hayward and Lodge needed the name to continue, so they did, along with Edge, and there's a band plying the boards but somehow the magic's been lost, if only the Moody Blues had all died in a plane crash, they'd be legendary today, living kills your career. Look at John Sebastian, who's also lost his voice, when are we gonna acknowledge the greatness of his work?
But the Moodys not only had a long run, but they started their own genre, which I'm hesitant to label, "symphonic rock," "art rock," "classical rock"? Who cares, but they were not limited by trends, they went their own way, and won.
And Thomas was and is overshadowed by the giants Hayward and Lodge became. The dignified guy who played the flute... But in hindsight, he was an integral member of the Moody Blues, and provided leavening no other member could, his compositions were not only for royalties, they added flavor.
But now he's gone.
But he was 76. That seems young today, when people regularly live into their nineties. But not everybody. Forget those who die via misadventure, the Big C is always lurking, the older you live the greater the odds something's gonna get you.
And it got Ray Thomas, mere months before the Moodys' induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But that institution does not matter, it's the music that does. But having said that, so many undeserving acts got inducted before they did, thank god this wrong has been righted.
You see when you break the mold people don't like it. What category do you put the band in? You can't see Ray Thomas destroying hotel rooms. There was little personal mystery, few shenanigans, only music.
But that was enough.
I'm not sure if the Moody Blues will ever have a renaissance, they really haven't even gotten their victory lap, but if you were a fan, and they were legion, the band holds a special place in your heart, there was no competition, they set your mind free, took you on an adventure, AND IT ALL SOUNDED SO GOOD!
Ray Thomas was not a footnote.
The Moody Blues were not an also-ran.
They were part of the fabric when music drove the culture and ruled the world.
And in the eyes and ears of those who were there...
THEY STILL DO!
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We listened to "Days Of Future Passed" on the drive to college. It was one of, if not the only, albums my father could tolerate, a man who was a huge music fan who never cottoned to rock and roll.
It was not like today, when hip-hop bears little resemblance to what came before, other than the borrowing of a riff, although that era is past, we all grew up with classical music and show tunes and had a soft spot in our heart for them.
And speaking of that soft spot, I don't think the Moody Blues could make it today. Because they filled a niche that no longer exists. One wherein you sat in your bedroom alone, disconnected from a world that was oftentimes unsatisfying, and basked in this mellifluous sound. Now everybody's networked and connected, no one is really that out there, and if you are, you're put down, whereas that was our link back then, we were alienated outsiders, now everybody wants to be an insider and even nerds are trumpeted, but not back then.
We all knew "Go Now," the Denny Laine-sung song that flew up the chart that still works today.
"We've already said goodbye"
Sounds so quaint now, but it wasn't back then, then it was dark and meaningful, like life. The truth is people haven't changed, despite protestations by so-called winners and social networking preeners, people have no clue, they're feeling it out as they go along, faking it until they make it. And this experimentation and ethos used to be embodied in music, which is why rock became so big, but Reagan legitimized greed and MTV made everybody a visual star and...
It was never quite the same again.
There was no London Festival Orchestra, just a made-up name, but that does not mean people did not embrace "Days Of Future Passed," it featured two instant smashes, even though it took years for "Nights In White Satin" to become ubiquitous, but I always preferred "Tuesday Afternoon," speaking of haunting, this is why I lay on my bed and listened to music incessantly, the sound was rich, a magic carpet that carried you away to a better place, if people could make this music I wanted to get on board.
And on that album, two songs were written and sung by Ray Thomas, "Another Morning" and "Twilight Time." "Another Time" was straight out of "Peter and the Wolf," we knew this sound, now it was filtered into a new generation. My father would sit in the front seat as the sound emanated from the Norelco cassette deck, the one in my hand, not in the dash, and nod his head and sing along, what more could you ask for, that was nearly the entire extent of our father/son bonding.
And Thomas's "Twilight Time" represented the magic hour well, it was after the brightness of the day.
But the next Moodys album I purchased was "On The Threshold Of A Dream."
After breaking through the Moody Blues went on their own hejira, in their own direction, there were opuses with no singles and you either were a member of the club or you were not, and in that era if you didn't buy the albums you were not, you just heard about them via clued-in friends.
"On The Threshold Of A Dream" had a gatefold cover and a lyric sheet and I'd lie on the floor and listen and read and the track I liked most was "Send Me No Wine," and "Never Comes The Day" almost as much, but the song that creeped me out, that affected me the most, was "Dear Diary." This was before blogs, when people still did that, write in diaries. And the track was melancholy and weird and all together different from the rest of the record. I had to know more, that's when I read about Ray Thomas, with his moustache and flute, was he really in this band? Yes, he was, FROM THE VERY BEGINNING!
And there was an almost equally bizarre song on the second side by Thomas, "Lazy Day." This music was made in a vacuum, sans influences, it cared not a whit whether you were involved or not, you could open the door and enter its universe or not.
But if you did...
And just before I went to college for the very first time, the Moodys released their breakthrough LP, "A Question Of Balance." In retrospect, it was the weakest of the Hayward/Lodge era to that point, but the title cut was a radio smash, finally. But its best song was a Thomas composition, "And The Tide Rushes In." He was a master of this meaningful mood, this was less strange than his compositions on "On The Threshold Of A Dream," but still maintained that mood.
"You keep looking for someone
To tell your troubles to"
Isn't that what we're all looking for? So simple, yet so right.
And now I was in college, ensconced on the third floor of Hepburn Hall, all boys, just before the advent of coed dorms. And during winter term, right now, January of '71, I made friends with the stoner crowd, when that was people who imbibed instead of talked slowly and were out of it, and we'd meet every evening in Dave McCormick's room on the second floor and...
Dave had the missing albums, "In Search of the Lost Chord' and "To Our Children's Children's Children."
In retrospect, it's all about "In Search of the Lost Chord." It had little traction upon its release in '68, but it was a whole concept that once hooked you were completely engrossed by. Ultimately, John Lodge's "Ride My See-Saw" gained ubiquity, upon which Thomas contributed vocals, all members of the group but the drummer, Graeme Edge, did, but the key cut on the entire LP was something entitled "Legend of a Mind."
"Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, he's outside looking in"
Now you've got to picture it. We're a group of teenagers sitting in an overheated room in sub-freezing weather high on dope with the zilch dripping down and this six and a half minute opus was the soundtrack. The threshold to acceptance was barely there, and once you were enraptured you were taken away via the movements, singing "Timothy Leary," drifting along with the music when dope was still used mostly to aid your understanding and appreciation of the music. This is one of those cuts I think the younger generation would cotton to if they just heard it. It makes no reference to the top forty, it's in its own world, and when it hits the instrumental and surfs the zeitgeist you're flying above the earth, twisting and turning along with it, back when music wasn't in your face but in your pocket, a magical elixir that could change your life, no wonder we all followed it into this business.
Thomas also had another winner on "In Search of the Lost Chord," fans all know "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume."
"We're all looking for someone"
Now everybody tells us they have the answers, but back then the musicians did not, which drew us ever closer to them. They understood the game better than we did, we were jumping through the hoops of school, they'd jettisoned the system for an alternative world, the idea of selling out to the corporation was anathema, after all...
"I've still not found what I'm looking for"
"To Our Children's Children's Children" is a forgotten masterpiece, incredibly solid, sans hits, but you can play it from beginning to end without lifting the needle and when you do it's a revelation. I love "Candle Of Life," it's probably my favorite on the LP, no one does this anymore, meaningful without being sappy, especially a song that's not a single.
"Something you can't hide
Says you're lonely"
And we were. There was no Tinder, no dating apps, we went out to bars and clubs and were ignored, all we had to get us through were our records.
But the song that I think of when I think of "To Our Children's Children's Children" is Thomas's "Eternity Road."
"Traveling eternity road
What will you find there
Carrying your heavy load
Searching to find a piece of mind"
We were searching, that was what the sixties and seventies were all about. Today life is too harsh, people play it safe, otherwise you can't make it.
Thomas also wrote and sang "Floating" on "To Our Children's Children's Children," another solid track on a solid album.
Ultimately, Thomas wrote and sang "Our Guessing Game" and "Nice To Be Here" on 71's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," but the bloom was off the rose, they were completely serviceable, the latter better than that, but now it wasn't so much about the albums but the hits, and Justin Hayward had one in "The Story In Your Eyes," it eclipsed the rest of the record.
And "Seventh Sojourn" continued this paradigm. There was a modest hit, "Isn't Life Strange" and an even bigger one, "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)," which the Moody Blues really were not, they were their own paradigm, and not exactly filler, but nothing as magical as what had come before. Thomas's "For My Lady" was one of the strongest tracks on the LP, but I can't say that I played it incessantly.
And then I stopped, just as they did. They realized it was over, the well had run dry, and the band broke up and didn't reunite until '78 with "Octave." I was done, but I still listened to the old records, they were burned into my brain.
And now Ray Thomas is dead.
Pinder left the band long ago.
Thomas stopped touring around the millennium. And Hayward and Lodge needed the name to continue, so they did, along with Edge, and there's a band plying the boards but somehow the magic's been lost, if only the Moody Blues had all died in a plane crash, they'd be legendary today, living kills your career. Look at John Sebastian, who's also lost his voice, when are we gonna acknowledge the greatness of his work?
But the Moodys not only had a long run, but they started their own genre, which I'm hesitant to label, "symphonic rock," "art rock," "classical rock"? Who cares, but they were not limited by trends, they went their own way, and won.
And Thomas was and is overshadowed by the giants Hayward and Lodge became. The dignified guy who played the flute... But in hindsight, he was an integral member of the Moody Blues, and provided leavening no other member could, his compositions were not only for royalties, they added flavor.
But now he's gone.
But he was 76. That seems young today, when people regularly live into their nineties. But not everybody. Forget those who die via misadventure, the Big C is always lurking, the older you live the greater the odds something's gonna get you.
And it got Ray Thomas, mere months before the Moodys' induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But that institution does not matter, it's the music that does. But having said that, so many undeserving acts got inducted before they did, thank god this wrong has been righted.
You see when you break the mold people don't like it. What category do you put the band in? You can't see Ray Thomas destroying hotel rooms. There was little personal mystery, few shenanigans, only music.
But that was enough.
I'm not sure if the Moody Blues will ever have a renaissance, they really haven't even gotten their victory lap, but if you were a fan, and they were legion, the band holds a special place in your heart, there was no competition, they set your mind free, took you on an adventure, AND IT ALL SOUNDED SO GOOD!
Ray Thomas was not a footnote.
The Moody Blues were not an also-ran.
They were part of the fabric when music drove the culture and ruled the world.
And in the eyes and ears of those who were there...
THEY STILL DO!
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News Updates
THE HUFFPO SPOTIFY STORY
Are you getting this in your inbox? Some nobody named Blake Morgan who insists Spotify is screwing musicians wrote a letter that was posted on the HuffPo and then taken down and this screed is now being tossed around online like it's the Ten Commandments, or at least the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Morgan's complaint is that Spotify doesn't know what its business is, he seems to become completely unaware that distribution is a business unto itself, very profitable in fact, and believes that Spotify doesn't pay fealty to the music it traffics in and the streaming service is dying and is going to go to the government for help. And the reason you're reading nothing more about this is not because the truth is being squelched, but no one in power has time to waste swatting irrelevant ignoramuses down.
Just because you have an opinion does not mean it's entitled to be amplified.
Yes, Spotify loses money. But a lot of cash has been reinvested in expansion. Ever hear of an internet company? And talk to the recording industry, Spotify single-handedly turned around their fortunes. Bitching about Spotify is like bitching about cellphones. Bring back landlines, think of all those handset manufacturers whose business was eviscerated!
But I'm not gonna waste my time going any further, all I'll say is it's the unsuccessful and uninformed who get up in arms about this stuff, because they're not busy making money on their careers.
And there's plenty of money in Spotify, I point you to the Manatt graphic on compensation, read it and get up-to-date on royalties. And speaking of up-to-date, the below graphic is from 2016, streaming royalties are only going up as more people subscribe, Spotify just hit 70 million.
https://www.manatt.com/Manatt/media/Media/PDF/US-Streaming-Royalties-Explained.pdf
As for being a cheerleader for Spotify... Who wouldn't be? CD stores? It's growing the revenue pot. Its value has increased to nearly $20 billion. Is Lucian Grainge complaining...
OF COURSE NOT!
WIXEN
The $1.6 billion lawsuit.
There was a January 1, 2018 deadline in proposed legislation saying if you didn't sue by then, you forfeited the right to compensation. THAT'S why Wixen filed suit, he wants to keep his options open.
This is not going to hurt Spotify's stock price. The sky is not falling. This is mostly a database issue, or the lack of one. Something that affects the business at large, that no one wants to pay for but everyone bitches does not exist.
JIMMY IOVINE
He's already toast. He's already been marginalized at Apple. Who cares if he says he's gonna stay, and whether he does. He's a marketing guy at a tech company.
As for his statement that the music industry cannot depend upon technology to solve its problems... Wait a second, the CD brought in beaucoup bucks, Napster killed revenue and streaming built it back up. Jimmy's MAIN complaint is Apple's market share is not increasing fast enough and he's not getting enough of the cash. It'd be like Best Buy bitching about Amazon. Spotify has a free, ad-supported tier. Apple does not. That's Apple's CHOICE! Spotify wants a free tier because it eviscerates piracy and causes paid conversion, Apple is sans this tool, and now it wants to level the playing field in its favor, huh? As for exclusives... They're not good for the industry, which is why they've been killed. Jimmy wants to make Apple a bigger service by providing that which Spotify does not. It'd be kinda like Microsoft saying it should be able to eclipse Google by including search results in Bing! that Mountain View does not have. Huh? Apple was caught flat-footed with machine learning playlists, i.e. Discover. Everything Jimmy thought was gonna work was old school and didn't, Beats 1 radio, hand-curated playlists... Didn't he read Brad Stone's Amazon book "The Everything Store"? Book sales went UP when they used algorithms instead of people for recommendations, the data is better. And the bubble suggestions held over from the original Beats service... How quaint and unusable. A worse Pandora. Spotify builds features, Apple bitches. This is Jimmy's paradigm, he's positively old school, he thinks business is conducted on the telephone and you claw and implore your way to success. Today you never talk and you lead with data. Which is why the streaming services kill radio. They go with what is reacting, what's real, they cut out the middleman, it's how hip-hop became so big. And if you want to be that big you should embrace these tools too, drive fans to streaming, get paid. And if no one is listening, you won't, get paid that is. Everybody starts equal. But not everybody wins.
AMAZON/VOICE
No one is talking about this. How you can get so much music for free with Prime on your Echo, how you can get an Echo subscription for $3.99. Voice-activation is here. It's better for music than most other products. Once again, music leads. Get an Echo Show, get Amazon Music, watch the lyrics stream by as you listen. You'll be sold.
Then again, you'll have to use it.
Some things never change. If you want to have an opinion, you've got to adopt, early.
And at this point Apple Music has been vastly improved. But the problem is it's still worse than Spotify, hell, Amazon's mobile interface is even better. The iPod had a better interface, better speed and a better box. You can be late to market only if you're a great leap forward. As the iPhone was re Palm and the BlackBerry. Apple Music is a me-too product because Apple stopped innovating and was blindsided by Spotify. As for its voice-activated speaker... Too expensive and too late. And when was the last time people were concerned about sound, didn't Apple lead with the lame white earbuds? Expensive comes first, cheap comes later. If you're lucky, cheap comes first, that's what tech has taught us. Google is nearly giving away their Home product and Apple wants us to overpay for essentially the same thing?
I don't think so.
Are you getting this in your inbox? Some nobody named Blake Morgan who insists Spotify is screwing musicians wrote a letter that was posted on the HuffPo and then taken down and this screed is now being tossed around online like it's the Ten Commandments, or at least the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Morgan's complaint is that Spotify doesn't know what its business is, he seems to become completely unaware that distribution is a business unto itself, very profitable in fact, and believes that Spotify doesn't pay fealty to the music it traffics in and the streaming service is dying and is going to go to the government for help. And the reason you're reading nothing more about this is not because the truth is being squelched, but no one in power has time to waste swatting irrelevant ignoramuses down.
Just because you have an opinion does not mean it's entitled to be amplified.
Yes, Spotify loses money. But a lot of cash has been reinvested in expansion. Ever hear of an internet company? And talk to the recording industry, Spotify single-handedly turned around their fortunes. Bitching about Spotify is like bitching about cellphones. Bring back landlines, think of all those handset manufacturers whose business was eviscerated!
But I'm not gonna waste my time going any further, all I'll say is it's the unsuccessful and uninformed who get up in arms about this stuff, because they're not busy making money on their careers.
And there's plenty of money in Spotify, I point you to the Manatt graphic on compensation, read it and get up-to-date on royalties. And speaking of up-to-date, the below graphic is from 2016, streaming royalties are only going up as more people subscribe, Spotify just hit 70 million.
https://www.manatt.com/Manatt/media/Media/PDF/US-Streaming-Royalties-Explained.pdf
As for being a cheerleader for Spotify... Who wouldn't be? CD stores? It's growing the revenue pot. Its value has increased to nearly $20 billion. Is Lucian Grainge complaining...
OF COURSE NOT!
WIXEN
The $1.6 billion lawsuit.
There was a January 1, 2018 deadline in proposed legislation saying if you didn't sue by then, you forfeited the right to compensation. THAT'S why Wixen filed suit, he wants to keep his options open.
This is not going to hurt Spotify's stock price. The sky is not falling. This is mostly a database issue, or the lack of one. Something that affects the business at large, that no one wants to pay for but everyone bitches does not exist.
JIMMY IOVINE
He's already toast. He's already been marginalized at Apple. Who cares if he says he's gonna stay, and whether he does. He's a marketing guy at a tech company.
As for his statement that the music industry cannot depend upon technology to solve its problems... Wait a second, the CD brought in beaucoup bucks, Napster killed revenue and streaming built it back up. Jimmy's MAIN complaint is Apple's market share is not increasing fast enough and he's not getting enough of the cash. It'd be like Best Buy bitching about Amazon. Spotify has a free, ad-supported tier. Apple does not. That's Apple's CHOICE! Spotify wants a free tier because it eviscerates piracy and causes paid conversion, Apple is sans this tool, and now it wants to level the playing field in its favor, huh? As for exclusives... They're not good for the industry, which is why they've been killed. Jimmy wants to make Apple a bigger service by providing that which Spotify does not. It'd be kinda like Microsoft saying it should be able to eclipse Google by including search results in Bing! that Mountain View does not have. Huh? Apple was caught flat-footed with machine learning playlists, i.e. Discover. Everything Jimmy thought was gonna work was old school and didn't, Beats 1 radio, hand-curated playlists... Didn't he read Brad Stone's Amazon book "The Everything Store"? Book sales went UP when they used algorithms instead of people for recommendations, the data is better. And the bubble suggestions held over from the original Beats service... How quaint and unusable. A worse Pandora. Spotify builds features, Apple bitches. This is Jimmy's paradigm, he's positively old school, he thinks business is conducted on the telephone and you claw and implore your way to success. Today you never talk and you lead with data. Which is why the streaming services kill radio. They go with what is reacting, what's real, they cut out the middleman, it's how hip-hop became so big. And if you want to be that big you should embrace these tools too, drive fans to streaming, get paid. And if no one is listening, you won't, get paid that is. Everybody starts equal. But not everybody wins.
AMAZON/VOICE
No one is talking about this. How you can get so much music for free with Prime on your Echo, how you can get an Echo subscription for $3.99. Voice-activation is here. It's better for music than most other products. Once again, music leads. Get an Echo Show, get Amazon Music, watch the lyrics stream by as you listen. You'll be sold.
Then again, you'll have to use it.
Some things never change. If you want to have an opinion, you've got to adopt, early.
And at this point Apple Music has been vastly improved. But the problem is it's still worse than Spotify, hell, Amazon's mobile interface is even better. The iPod had a better interface, better speed and a better box. You can be late to market only if you're a great leap forward. As the iPhone was re Palm and the BlackBerry. Apple Music is a me-too product because Apple stopped innovating and was blindsided by Spotify. As for its voice-activated speaker... Too expensive and too late. And when was the last time people were concerned about sound, didn't Apple lead with the lame white earbuds? Expensive comes first, cheap comes later. If you're lucky, cheap comes first, that's what tech has taught us. Google is nearly giving away their Home product and Apple wants us to overpay for essentially the same thing?
I don't think so.
--
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Tuesday 9 January 2018
Luke Bryan's "Pick It Up"
https://open.spotify.com/track/2IHawy6xc5ezcHjIOCteVJ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCygAG_zzxs
"What Makes You Country" is so generic, so formulaic, that you wince.
And then you play it a couple of times and you cannot stop listening, you'll stay up late at night just to let it play. That's what happened to me long after midnight. I wanted to finish the Wolff book, but I could not stop playing this LP, songs were revealing themselves to me left and right and I was getting deeper and deeper going down the rabbit hole feeling good, and ain't that what it's all about?
Generic like Boston. But with fewer innovations and better songs. That's right, Boston ushered in corporate rock, it's just that a few of those tracks were so damn good you couldn't take the record off the turntable, although they could not follow it up. Whereas Luke Bryan keeps chugging along and although I think "Kill The Lights" was a comedown from "Crash My Party," "What Makes You Country" is right up there, although, as stated above, I didn't feel this way at first.
You see your heroes disappoint you. Like Keith Urban, a stellar guitarist who peaked with 2009's "Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing" and failed with its follow-up, "Defying Gravity," and has pulled back from the precipice, is testing limits no more, just recording pabulum which I don't even think he believes in.
But Luke Bryan was never shooting that high. It was kinda modern good ole boy rock and roll filtered through country, but he knew it was about changes and melody and his voice works and...
I'm a fan.
That's right, we've got three music businesses.
One, the people who don't care a whit. Who are completely ignored. The ones who've got no idea who Drake is, never mind Post Malone or Lil Yachty. They detached, they believe there's nothing for them, and they might put a Pandora station on in the background, but really they don't care. It's kinda like Snapchat. A lot of hoopla, not that many users. Do we need another social network? The media says yes, until it turned and trashed the service. It's a game they play, they build you up to tear you down but it doesn't reflect the user's experience. We fall in love and it takes a lot to break the bond.
Like mine with Luke Bryan.
Two, the people who consume. They follow the hits and go to the show.
Three, the hipsters, who believe whatever you listen to sucks and insist you must like their music, which is outside and referential and oftentimes features bad vocalists, ensuring it will never go mainstream, which is exactly what they want.
Is it okay to be in camp two?
I oftentimes am. And you should see my inbox! If it's popular, they hate it! They know better. They e-mail me their favorites. And I laugh, because this just demonstrates how out of touch they are. Sure, be a fan, but don't you know you're in your own backwater, that this ain't the twentieth century no more, and there's a plethora of product and no cohesion and you're a party of one?
But online everybody gets a voice and there's so much noise that you end up with group one above, the people who completely tune it out. Think about it, who wants all that noise in your head?
So I'm thinking about this modern country. How it's not really country at all. That's right haters, you're right, so what? If you added a twang it wouldn't be so big. But it does represent different values from hip-hop. Hip-hop is reacting, country is uniting. And that's so weird, because I'm an alienated boy, but when you get universal emotions right, I cave, because I'm human, and at the core I want to connect.
So the advantage of being a big star is you get the best songs, whether it be in country or pop. The idea of doing it yourself, the singer-songwriter, is at a low ebb. Now it's about a team. And if you want to make bank, you hook up with a star, to get paid, you want them to cover your song. Which is why Carrie Underwood is a nitwit but ends up with so many hits. She's as bland as bland can be personally, paper-thin, but those songs!
Same deal with Luke Bryan. Although he cowrites a bunch of them. Who knows where his participation begins or ends, and a lot of the songs are not that personal, to his ultimate detriment, but when he rings true, like on "Pick It Up"...
"What Makes You Country," the title track, is like a Bon Jovi cut, like "Let It Rock" from "Slippery When Wet," although the guitars aren't as turned up in the chorus. And if Bon Jovi can get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...
And "Light It Up" is already a hit.
"Most People Are Good" shoots so low, panders so much, that the only way you can enjoy it is by ignoring the lyrics, and then it works, because the changes and vocal delivery are so damn good.
And then you get stuff like "Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset," which aims so low but feels so good, what a conundrum. But the hooks are solid, as are the changes, and you hear it three times and you can't get the damn chorus out of your head.
Shooting even lower is "Drinking Again." This is music for the mindless.
But then there's stuff that shoots a bit higher, like "Like You Say You Do," and you begin to wonder whether you're being too critical, Luke's selling this stuff, unlike too much modern pop, there are changes in the verse, you can see yourself driving down the highway with the window down and your hair blowing in the wind and nodding your head and singing along.
And a trifle like "Driving This Thing" gets under your skin, your resistance is fading, listening is just too enjoyable.
Even the closing, everyman, wisdom-laden "Win Life" which you hate in principle you love, because of the vibe and changes and the loping groove. I mean underneath it all we're similar, people, just trying to get through, music is supposed to soothe, make it easier, and this does.
But the piece-de-resistance is buried deep into the album at #13, "Pick It Up."
It's the cut no one talks about, that you find by accident, but on the very first time through your ears perk up and realize this is the song on the album.
It's the sound of the instruments in the intro, in the race to the sonic bottom we underestimate these tweaks that used to make hit records back in the hi-fi era, but some engineer gets these sounds just right, they're so inviting. And then...
"I put a fishing rod by your bed, right next to a Bible"
DON'T TUNE OUT! I don't care if you believe, just as you don't tell me to. Whatever gets you through. But let's keep religion out of politics.
"I leaned a guitar in the corner of your room with some Milsap on vinyl"
Back when people used to play, all the country acts do, they're the ones keeping Gibson in business.
And sure, Eric Church sang about vinyl records earlier, but isn't it funny that the supposed outsiders are up on the trends more than the insiders in hip-hop and pop?
"I figured the best thing I could do was put a thing or two
That it wouldn't hurt to have in your way, on your path"
Influences. We want to give the next generation inspiration.
"Hoping you might pick it up one day
And you might learn a couple pretty cool things that I love to do"
He wants to show him who he is. Guys don't know how to communicate, he's trying to demonstrate his identity via these gestures.
"Then you can take it and spin it and fit it to you"
Funny, this is the opposite of the elite paradigm, where kids are born to bank, to be winners in the footsteps of their fathers, taking no risk, doing no exploring, just being what they're expected to be, and that's just plain sad, never mind a wasted life.
"I don't know what you're gonna be
But I hope you smile when you think of me
'Cause I helped make you
But I didn't ever try to make you pick it up
You just pick it up, pick it up"
My father never asked me what I was taking in college, didn't care about my grades, same deal in law school, as long as I was passing, doing my job, he let me be who I wanted to be.
Not like my friends from my generation. They're micromanaging the careers of their kids, even calling the college. You've got to let people fail, you've got to let people be who they want to be, or they're hobbled and ultimately resentful. That's the crazy thing about life, you can influence people but you can't control them, they've got to find out for themselves.
But there are a few other influences baked in:
"Early to rise, heading to work, open a door for a stranger
Yes sir, yes ma'am, red dirt on my hands
Showing you the best way I can"
He's teaching through example, how to behave as a gentleman in this life.
"Dancing and kissing your momma in the kitchen
Treatin' her like a princess
Hoping you might pick it up one day"
This is how we're gonna solve the #MeToo problem. Present fathers acting reasonably passing wisdom and behavior down.
And now Luke Bryan's gonna be a judge on "American Idol." What a waste. Now he's gonna be everybody's when the key to longevity is just to be somebody's, it's always best to stay one mark away from the center, so your audience can bond to you.
And that show will fail anyway, because it's not about singing but drama, and sans Simon Cowell, it's toast. Not that anybody involved seems to know this.
But they know how to write songs in Nashville. It's a factory, an assembly line. But they make BMWs on an assembly line. Then again, that's business, not art. And if I want to be honest, Luke Bryan's "What Makes You Country" is more business than art, but there's a satisfaction in getting behind the wheel of a Toyota or Honda and knowing everything just works.
"What Makes You Country" just works.
Well done.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCygAG_zzxs
"What Makes You Country" is so generic, so formulaic, that you wince.
And then you play it a couple of times and you cannot stop listening, you'll stay up late at night just to let it play. That's what happened to me long after midnight. I wanted to finish the Wolff book, but I could not stop playing this LP, songs were revealing themselves to me left and right and I was getting deeper and deeper going down the rabbit hole feeling good, and ain't that what it's all about?
Generic like Boston. But with fewer innovations and better songs. That's right, Boston ushered in corporate rock, it's just that a few of those tracks were so damn good you couldn't take the record off the turntable, although they could not follow it up. Whereas Luke Bryan keeps chugging along and although I think "Kill The Lights" was a comedown from "Crash My Party," "What Makes You Country" is right up there, although, as stated above, I didn't feel this way at first.
You see your heroes disappoint you. Like Keith Urban, a stellar guitarist who peaked with 2009's "Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing" and failed with its follow-up, "Defying Gravity," and has pulled back from the precipice, is testing limits no more, just recording pabulum which I don't even think he believes in.
But Luke Bryan was never shooting that high. It was kinda modern good ole boy rock and roll filtered through country, but he knew it was about changes and melody and his voice works and...
I'm a fan.
That's right, we've got three music businesses.
One, the people who don't care a whit. Who are completely ignored. The ones who've got no idea who Drake is, never mind Post Malone or Lil Yachty. They detached, they believe there's nothing for them, and they might put a Pandora station on in the background, but really they don't care. It's kinda like Snapchat. A lot of hoopla, not that many users. Do we need another social network? The media says yes, until it turned and trashed the service. It's a game they play, they build you up to tear you down but it doesn't reflect the user's experience. We fall in love and it takes a lot to break the bond.
Like mine with Luke Bryan.
Two, the people who consume. They follow the hits and go to the show.
Three, the hipsters, who believe whatever you listen to sucks and insist you must like their music, which is outside and referential and oftentimes features bad vocalists, ensuring it will never go mainstream, which is exactly what they want.
Is it okay to be in camp two?
I oftentimes am. And you should see my inbox! If it's popular, they hate it! They know better. They e-mail me their favorites. And I laugh, because this just demonstrates how out of touch they are. Sure, be a fan, but don't you know you're in your own backwater, that this ain't the twentieth century no more, and there's a plethora of product and no cohesion and you're a party of one?
But online everybody gets a voice and there's so much noise that you end up with group one above, the people who completely tune it out. Think about it, who wants all that noise in your head?
So I'm thinking about this modern country. How it's not really country at all. That's right haters, you're right, so what? If you added a twang it wouldn't be so big. But it does represent different values from hip-hop. Hip-hop is reacting, country is uniting. And that's so weird, because I'm an alienated boy, but when you get universal emotions right, I cave, because I'm human, and at the core I want to connect.
So the advantage of being a big star is you get the best songs, whether it be in country or pop. The idea of doing it yourself, the singer-songwriter, is at a low ebb. Now it's about a team. And if you want to make bank, you hook up with a star, to get paid, you want them to cover your song. Which is why Carrie Underwood is a nitwit but ends up with so many hits. She's as bland as bland can be personally, paper-thin, but those songs!
Same deal with Luke Bryan. Although he cowrites a bunch of them. Who knows where his participation begins or ends, and a lot of the songs are not that personal, to his ultimate detriment, but when he rings true, like on "Pick It Up"...
"What Makes You Country," the title track, is like a Bon Jovi cut, like "Let It Rock" from "Slippery When Wet," although the guitars aren't as turned up in the chorus. And if Bon Jovi can get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...
And "Light It Up" is already a hit.
"Most People Are Good" shoots so low, panders so much, that the only way you can enjoy it is by ignoring the lyrics, and then it works, because the changes and vocal delivery are so damn good.
And then you get stuff like "Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset," which aims so low but feels so good, what a conundrum. But the hooks are solid, as are the changes, and you hear it three times and you can't get the damn chorus out of your head.
Shooting even lower is "Drinking Again." This is music for the mindless.
But then there's stuff that shoots a bit higher, like "Like You Say You Do," and you begin to wonder whether you're being too critical, Luke's selling this stuff, unlike too much modern pop, there are changes in the verse, you can see yourself driving down the highway with the window down and your hair blowing in the wind and nodding your head and singing along.
And a trifle like "Driving This Thing" gets under your skin, your resistance is fading, listening is just too enjoyable.
Even the closing, everyman, wisdom-laden "Win Life" which you hate in principle you love, because of the vibe and changes and the loping groove. I mean underneath it all we're similar, people, just trying to get through, music is supposed to soothe, make it easier, and this does.
But the piece-de-resistance is buried deep into the album at #13, "Pick It Up."
It's the cut no one talks about, that you find by accident, but on the very first time through your ears perk up and realize this is the song on the album.
It's the sound of the instruments in the intro, in the race to the sonic bottom we underestimate these tweaks that used to make hit records back in the hi-fi era, but some engineer gets these sounds just right, they're so inviting. And then...
"I put a fishing rod by your bed, right next to a Bible"
DON'T TUNE OUT! I don't care if you believe, just as you don't tell me to. Whatever gets you through. But let's keep religion out of politics.
"I leaned a guitar in the corner of your room with some Milsap on vinyl"
Back when people used to play, all the country acts do, they're the ones keeping Gibson in business.
And sure, Eric Church sang about vinyl records earlier, but isn't it funny that the supposed outsiders are up on the trends more than the insiders in hip-hop and pop?
"I figured the best thing I could do was put a thing or two
That it wouldn't hurt to have in your way, on your path"
Influences. We want to give the next generation inspiration.
"Hoping you might pick it up one day
And you might learn a couple pretty cool things that I love to do"
He wants to show him who he is. Guys don't know how to communicate, he's trying to demonstrate his identity via these gestures.
"Then you can take it and spin it and fit it to you"
Funny, this is the opposite of the elite paradigm, where kids are born to bank, to be winners in the footsteps of their fathers, taking no risk, doing no exploring, just being what they're expected to be, and that's just plain sad, never mind a wasted life.
"I don't know what you're gonna be
But I hope you smile when you think of me
'Cause I helped make you
But I didn't ever try to make you pick it up
You just pick it up, pick it up"
My father never asked me what I was taking in college, didn't care about my grades, same deal in law school, as long as I was passing, doing my job, he let me be who I wanted to be.
Not like my friends from my generation. They're micromanaging the careers of their kids, even calling the college. You've got to let people fail, you've got to let people be who they want to be, or they're hobbled and ultimately resentful. That's the crazy thing about life, you can influence people but you can't control them, they've got to find out for themselves.
But there are a few other influences baked in:
"Early to rise, heading to work, open a door for a stranger
Yes sir, yes ma'am, red dirt on my hands
Showing you the best way I can"
He's teaching through example, how to behave as a gentleman in this life.
"Dancing and kissing your momma in the kitchen
Treatin' her like a princess
Hoping you might pick it up one day"
This is how we're gonna solve the #MeToo problem. Present fathers acting reasonably passing wisdom and behavior down.
And now Luke Bryan's gonna be a judge on "American Idol." What a waste. Now he's gonna be everybody's when the key to longevity is just to be somebody's, it's always best to stay one mark away from the center, so your audience can bond to you.
And that show will fail anyway, because it's not about singing but drama, and sans Simon Cowell, it's toast. Not that anybody involved seems to know this.
But they know how to write songs in Nashville. It's a factory, an assembly line. But they make BMWs on an assembly line. Then again, that's business, not art. And if I want to be honest, Luke Bryan's "What Makes You Country" is more business than art, but there's a satisfaction in getting behind the wheel of a Toyota or Honda and knowing everything just works.
"What Makes You Country" just works.
Well done.
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This Week's Podcast
Actually, I'm still thinking about next week's podcast, which we recorded yesterday, with...
Tony Hawk.
He was so affable, professional and erudite! He did the promos better than I did, having had so much media experience. And one of the things he said was that haters don't bother him, he's been hated since day one, he was forever the runt, even though he's now 6'4". As for being accused of selling out, Tony said HIS STUFF WAS FINALLY SELLING! Once he gained media notoriety, people were buying his Birdhouse boards, all he had in place was finally working, but the critics came out in force. Funny how that works, they want what you've got. And they've got no idea of the dues you've paid.
You see skateboarding was cyclical. It would rise up, and crash. Kinda like the history of EDM. They always exist, but they've got peaks. And after being number one Tony had to sell his house and was eating ramen trying to get his business together. They don't tell you about that, the dues they pay.
But that's next week.
This week is the continuation of my conversation with John Boyle, which kicked off this endeavor. I rant and rave on many subjects and Boyle barely gets a word in edgewise, but if you're interested in what I have to say, it's all there, in passionate diatribe, let the slings and arrows begin!
TuneIn: tun.in/tiigPr
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast/id1316200737?mt=2&i=1000397753495
Google Play: play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Ijrpbkgbdxmjxc3netk434lpsv4
Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast
Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1316200737/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast
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Tony Hawk.
He was so affable, professional and erudite! He did the promos better than I did, having had so much media experience. And one of the things he said was that haters don't bother him, he's been hated since day one, he was forever the runt, even though he's now 6'4". As for being accused of selling out, Tony said HIS STUFF WAS FINALLY SELLING! Once he gained media notoriety, people were buying his Birdhouse boards, all he had in place was finally working, but the critics came out in force. Funny how that works, they want what you've got. And they've got no idea of the dues you've paid.
You see skateboarding was cyclical. It would rise up, and crash. Kinda like the history of EDM. They always exist, but they've got peaks. And after being number one Tony had to sell his house and was eating ramen trying to get his business together. They don't tell you about that, the dues they pay.
But that's next week.
This week is the continuation of my conversation with John Boyle, which kicked off this endeavor. I rant and rave on many subjects and Boyle barely gets a word in edgewise, but if you're interested in what I have to say, it's all there, in passionate diatribe, let the slings and arrows begin!
TuneIn: tun.in/tiigPr
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast/id1316200737?mt=2&i=1000397753495
Google Play: play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Ijrpbkgbdxmjxc3netk434lpsv4
Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast
Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1316200737/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast
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Monday 8 January 2018
Mailbag
Re: The Golden Globes
I'm a 43 year old man living in the Chicago suburbs. I'm married with one son who is turning 6 next month. My wife and I are both college educated (she graduated from Notre Dame) and have been working professionally for 20 years. We're far from "rich", but we do consider ourselves fortunate, as there are many people who have it far worse than we do. We're also pop culture geeks (I'm rooted in the 70's through 90's, she's got her finger on the pulse of what's hot today), so we found ourselves watching the Golden Globes last night, me more out of curiosity as to how they were going to address the "elephant" in the room.
They addressed it just as I thought they would. They took some humorous digs at the obvious targets (Weinstein and Spacey) and of course Oprah gave a rousing Kumbaya speech which often times sounded like an updated version of the famous "I"m mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," scene from Network (there's that 70's pop culture). I'm not making fun of the subject matter. I'm not suggesting that gender equality and sexual assault aren't serious issues. What I was overwhelmed with this morning while commuting through Chicago rush hour is the notion that Hollywood wants to pat themselves on the back in front of the whole world for being "progressive" and making these advancements toward a safer, more equitable workplace, when the rest of us who actually work for a living and don't have a staff of people to cater to our every need have known for decades how to behave and treat one another. I'm aware that gender inequality still exists, especially when it comes to income. But Hollywood wants to believe that they are on the cutting edge and leading the charge when they are clearly following and catching up in this matter. I've worked professionally for three companies. I have heard many stories of the cliche office Holiday Parties from the 70's and 80's that got way out of hand. But all the companies I've worked for have implemented strict policies and professional etiquette standards over the last two or three decades. Has this eliminated abhorrent behavior? No, but there are procedures in place to deal with it
I know as a society we have a LONG way to go before we can claim to treat everyone equally. And I'm fully aware that as a white male my response may sound ignorant to the problems that still plague women and minorities in the workplace. Last night's awards show was a completely self serving (more so than usual) effort to protect the product that they all sell and make a fortune from.
Neil Johnson
____________________________________
Subject: Re: The Golden Globes
agree. I attended and was bored stiff. this evening used to be FUN! instead it's a series of insulated, self congratulatory bs. no one should argue the the merits of "times up" but to hijack the show and it's participants was a big mistake. one nominee told me he felt coerced into wearing the "me too" pin (he had made a big $ donation to the cause) and there was no fashion on the red carpet. black gowns, and the pressure to wear them, took away the glitz, glamor and frivolity. the room looked and felt bored, bland and tired. viewers want spontaneity. they want an escape from the everyday hum drum....one of the organizers told me the night before that the hfp was concerned that the show would follow this path and his fears were confirmed. Hollywood is becoming a laughing stock....mired in hypocrisy, platitudes and old school thinking. sadly, it was a good night for our stable genius potus.
____________________________________
Subject: Re: Harvey's Tune
Hi Bob,
I am Caroline Ray, sister of Brian Ray (McCartney guitarist/bass player), and Jean Ray (Jim and Jean folk duo of the 60s).
Harvey played on the Jim and Jean "Changes" album and although Jean has passed, we are still in touch with Harvey who lives in Jerusalem.
He told me recently that he wrote "Harvey's Tune" at Jean's mother's beach house in Malibu. He was bunking there while working on an album with Jean. Harvey also wrote "One Sure Thing" with Jean which appeared on the "Changes" album.
Anyway, I love backstories and I thought you might enjoy this one. I am a fan of your emails.
Regards,
Caroline Ray
____________________________________
From: Peter Wheeler
Subject: Re Steve Martin's piece on United Air
Once, arriving in Maui, I left my wallet in the seat back pocket. Within 15minutes I was at the United booth, explaining my predicament, seat number, etc. they quickly said, oh, we sub out the cleaning, you'll never see it again.
I wrote UA numerous times, complained on the united.com site, nothing.....
____________________________________
Subject: Re: Harvey's Tune
Hey Bob, I love your column, and this particular story about "Super Session"; and whether or not blues-rooted rock n' roll music can generate new interest in 2018. There's a band called "The Record Company" doing just that. They're signed to Concord Records, Grammy nominated for best contemporary blues album, sold 80K+ records, opened for John Mayer's arena tour in 2017, and have had 3 top 10 AAA radio songs, including the #1 song "Off The Ground". They seem fond of The Stones, John Lee Hooker, and Iggy & The Stooges.
Do I sound like a guy pitching his own band? Well yes, truth be told, I'm the bass player for The Record Company. I read your column daily, and I'm always interested in "Bob's take" on all things music biz. But I do feel in the same way mainstream acts like U2, Taylor, & Kanye have adapted to today's climate, there are new bands like us creating successful business models and careers as well.
Our first gig was 6 years ago at Harvard & Stone in LA to 30 people; we quickly starting getting weekly residencies at the The Satellite, Hotel Café, & The Mint, etc. Within 2 years, we were selling out every local show in LA. We put out 3 EPs ourselves, all with a simple rule of: DO NOT release an "album" until there's a national demand for it. The only places outside of LA that took much interest were blues festivals, so we got out and rented a Dodge Minivan and toured. We did this for a few years and still the industry could care less. Our drummer was the travel agent and tour manager, I was the merch guy, our singer was the charming press guy. Eventually in 2014, we got booked as the opener on Brian Setzer's tour, and Concord Records starting sending reps out all over the country to see us. We signed in early 2015.
Skip to the present: our last LA show was at The Fonda, we played 2 sold out nights at Thalia Hall in Chicago, played the Fillmore in SF, and Irving Plaza in NYC. We've played Conan, Colbert, and CBS This Morning. Satellite radio, and the AAA format has been huge for us. We live on the same charts as many bands you have heard of: Arcade Fire, The Lumineers, Portugal The Man, Chili Peppers, etc. Our music is in the Miller Lite ads, the Netflix shows and movies, and in the stadiums at the Green Bay Packers games. It is getting out there, but hardly an overnight success.
Most importantly, we are a hard working band playing rock n roll music. We created something special that is catching on. We don't expect to be as big as Taylor Swift – but that's ok, we are doing it our way, and have careers that we are proud of. When people say, "Rock N Roll is DEAD!", it only fuels us to work harder and show people with our songs and our shows that it isn't. People are coming to see us, and people are buying the records. I own a .99 vinyl copy of Super Session, it's beat to hell, and it's one of my favorites...
Here's a link for you below if you're interested. Thanks for being you, and writing and inspiring us on daily basis...
-alex (the bass player)
"Off The Ground" (#1 at AAA radio)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8aNK3XMP5w
P.S. one interesting fact is that we made the whole record in my living room, on pretty shitty equipment. So imagine that: a living room record getting grammy noms, colbert appearances, and john mayer tours. We played Madison Square Garden with him last march and it was a dream come true. We are on Spotify if you search The Record Company and want to hear more. I'm particularly proud of this video from New Years Eve at The Riverside Theater in Milwaukee 3 nights ago covering Jumping Jack Flash. Our singer is from there, so it was a special night! Check this:
https://www.facebook.com/therecordcompany/videos/1781843448598390/
and there's lots of cool live videos of us on YouTube as well. cheers,
-alex
____________________________________
Bob, It's Franke Previte . A lot of my friend have been emailing me about your article and saying you should tell Bob the story on how you wrote the song (I've had) The time of my life. So not to drag this out to long. I was working on the 4th Franke and the Knockout record. The song Hungry Eyes was already written and passed on by every label when I received a phone call from the president of the label that sold the band to MCA two years earlier. This guys names was Jimmy Ienner, he went on to tell about a movie he was working on called Dirty Dancing. My first thoughts was poor Jimmy's doing porn. He gave me a five minute description of the movie and I replied, sorry Jimmy, I'm to busy work on my next record. He replied "make time this going to change your life!" I laugh inside because he had already changed my life when he closed his label two years earlier. So here where the song writing of the song began. As history tell it, I accepted his offer and called John DeNicola whom I wrote Hungry Eyes with and John sent me a track of music and on my way to the studio in my car exit 140 on the Garden state Parkway I started to Jam to a cassette mumbling Da Da dime of my life and the next thing I knew the Man up stairs wrote the rest of the song.
When I met Patrick Swazye at the Academy Award he told they had turned down 149 and hated the movie because it did have a great ending song. They filmed the last scene first and when the last cassette came in the 150th they filmed to me singing (I've had) The time of my life with Rachele Cappelli.the only duet that was submitted. and the rest is history. Today I now sell those same demo of my two song to help raise money for Pancreatic Cancer. If you go to my Facebook page Dirty Dancing Demos you'll see me with Lisa Swayze. So please pass the word and lets all help wage war on Pancreatic Cancer.
Thanks Bob for taking the time to read my story and have a Happy and Healthy Holiday season.
Franke Previte
____________________________________
From: Theo Aronson
Subject: Willis Earl Beal
Stop what you're doing and listen to this cover by Willis Earl Beal: https://open.spotify.com/track/2B3Ns8rUJhbsboJ43yWYbV
I just discovered it thanks to this State Farm commercial on TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceK5ukiw6cc
Have you heard this shit? Fuck, thats a great cover, and it that reminded me what a great song that is. Original Simple Minds recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqoNKCCt7A
Did some deeper digging and looks like he released a couple lo-fi albums on XL Recordings back in 2012/2013 before going kinda AWOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Earl_Beal
I've got nothing to do with him, but wanted to put on your radar because that cover is the first thing of the year to give me goosebumps. Haven't found anything in his own canon that gives me the same feeling, but just a nice reminder of what a great song can do when paired with an equally great voice. First new tune of 2018 to really catch my ear.
If this commercial gets enough circulation, could this become Gary Jules "Mad World" of 2018?! Who the hell knows... Kudos to whatever came first: the music supervisor who A&Red this commercial or Willis for picking and covering this song.
Happy New Year, Bob!
I'm a 43 year old man living in the Chicago suburbs. I'm married with one son who is turning 6 next month. My wife and I are both college educated (she graduated from Notre Dame) and have been working professionally for 20 years. We're far from "rich", but we do consider ourselves fortunate, as there are many people who have it far worse than we do. We're also pop culture geeks (I'm rooted in the 70's through 90's, she's got her finger on the pulse of what's hot today), so we found ourselves watching the Golden Globes last night, me more out of curiosity as to how they were going to address the "elephant" in the room.
They addressed it just as I thought they would. They took some humorous digs at the obvious targets (Weinstein and Spacey) and of course Oprah gave a rousing Kumbaya speech which often times sounded like an updated version of the famous "I"m mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," scene from Network (there's that 70's pop culture). I'm not making fun of the subject matter. I'm not suggesting that gender equality and sexual assault aren't serious issues. What I was overwhelmed with this morning while commuting through Chicago rush hour is the notion that Hollywood wants to pat themselves on the back in front of the whole world for being "progressive" and making these advancements toward a safer, more equitable workplace, when the rest of us who actually work for a living and don't have a staff of people to cater to our every need have known for decades how to behave and treat one another. I'm aware that gender inequality still exists, especially when it comes to income. But Hollywood wants to believe that they are on the cutting edge and leading the charge when they are clearly following and catching up in this matter. I've worked professionally for three companies. I have heard many stories of the cliche office Holiday Parties from the 70's and 80's that got way out of hand. But all the companies I've worked for have implemented strict policies and professional etiquette standards over the last two or three decades. Has this eliminated abhorrent behavior? No, but there are procedures in place to deal with it
I know as a society we have a LONG way to go before we can claim to treat everyone equally. And I'm fully aware that as a white male my response may sound ignorant to the problems that still plague women and minorities in the workplace. Last night's awards show was a completely self serving (more so than usual) effort to protect the product that they all sell and make a fortune from.
Neil Johnson
____________________________________
Subject: Re: The Golden Globes
agree. I attended and was bored stiff. this evening used to be FUN! instead it's a series of insulated, self congratulatory bs. no one should argue the the merits of "times up" but to hijack the show and it's participants was a big mistake. one nominee told me he felt coerced into wearing the "me too" pin (he had made a big $ donation to the cause) and there was no fashion on the red carpet. black gowns, and the pressure to wear them, took away the glitz, glamor and frivolity. the room looked and felt bored, bland and tired. viewers want spontaneity. they want an escape from the everyday hum drum....one of the organizers told me the night before that the hfp was concerned that the show would follow this path and his fears were confirmed. Hollywood is becoming a laughing stock....mired in hypocrisy, platitudes and old school thinking. sadly, it was a good night for our stable genius potus.
____________________________________
Subject: Re: Harvey's Tune
Hi Bob,
I am Caroline Ray, sister of Brian Ray (McCartney guitarist/bass player), and Jean Ray (Jim and Jean folk duo of the 60s).
Harvey played on the Jim and Jean "Changes" album and although Jean has passed, we are still in touch with Harvey who lives in Jerusalem.
He told me recently that he wrote "Harvey's Tune" at Jean's mother's beach house in Malibu. He was bunking there while working on an album with Jean. Harvey also wrote "One Sure Thing" with Jean which appeared on the "Changes" album.
Anyway, I love backstories and I thought you might enjoy this one. I am a fan of your emails.
Regards,
Caroline Ray
____________________________________
From: Peter Wheeler
Subject: Re Steve Martin's piece on United Air
Once, arriving in Maui, I left my wallet in the seat back pocket. Within 15minutes I was at the United booth, explaining my predicament, seat number, etc. they quickly said, oh, we sub out the cleaning, you'll never see it again.
I wrote UA numerous times, complained on the united.com site, nothing.....
____________________________________
Subject: Re: Harvey's Tune
Hey Bob, I love your column, and this particular story about "Super Session"; and whether or not blues-rooted rock n' roll music can generate new interest in 2018. There's a band called "The Record Company" doing just that. They're signed to Concord Records, Grammy nominated for best contemporary blues album, sold 80K+ records, opened for John Mayer's arena tour in 2017, and have had 3 top 10 AAA radio songs, including the #1 song "Off The Ground". They seem fond of The Stones, John Lee Hooker, and Iggy & The Stooges.
Do I sound like a guy pitching his own band? Well yes, truth be told, I'm the bass player for The Record Company. I read your column daily, and I'm always interested in "Bob's take" on all things music biz. But I do feel in the same way mainstream acts like U2, Taylor, & Kanye have adapted to today's climate, there are new bands like us creating successful business models and careers as well.
Our first gig was 6 years ago at Harvard & Stone in LA to 30 people; we quickly starting getting weekly residencies at the The Satellite, Hotel Café, & The Mint, etc. Within 2 years, we were selling out every local show in LA. We put out 3 EPs ourselves, all with a simple rule of: DO NOT release an "album" until there's a national demand for it. The only places outside of LA that took much interest were blues festivals, so we got out and rented a Dodge Minivan and toured. We did this for a few years and still the industry could care less. Our drummer was the travel agent and tour manager, I was the merch guy, our singer was the charming press guy. Eventually in 2014, we got booked as the opener on Brian Setzer's tour, and Concord Records starting sending reps out all over the country to see us. We signed in early 2015.
Skip to the present: our last LA show was at The Fonda, we played 2 sold out nights at Thalia Hall in Chicago, played the Fillmore in SF, and Irving Plaza in NYC. We've played Conan, Colbert, and CBS This Morning. Satellite radio, and the AAA format has been huge for us. We live on the same charts as many bands you have heard of: Arcade Fire, The Lumineers, Portugal The Man, Chili Peppers, etc. Our music is in the Miller Lite ads, the Netflix shows and movies, and in the stadiums at the Green Bay Packers games. It is getting out there, but hardly an overnight success.
Most importantly, we are a hard working band playing rock n roll music. We created something special that is catching on. We don't expect to be as big as Taylor Swift – but that's ok, we are doing it our way, and have careers that we are proud of. When people say, "Rock N Roll is DEAD!", it only fuels us to work harder and show people with our songs and our shows that it isn't. People are coming to see us, and people are buying the records. I own a .99 vinyl copy of Super Session, it's beat to hell, and it's one of my favorites...
Here's a link for you below if you're interested. Thanks for being you, and writing and inspiring us on daily basis...
-alex (the bass player)
"Off The Ground" (#1 at AAA radio)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8aNK3XMP5w
P.S. one interesting fact is that we made the whole record in my living room, on pretty shitty equipment. So imagine that: a living room record getting grammy noms, colbert appearances, and john mayer tours. We played Madison Square Garden with him last march and it was a dream come true. We are on Spotify if you search The Record Company and want to hear more. I'm particularly proud of this video from New Years Eve at The Riverside Theater in Milwaukee 3 nights ago covering Jumping Jack Flash. Our singer is from there, so it was a special night! Check this:
https://www.facebook.com/therecordcompany/videos/1781843448598390/
and there's lots of cool live videos of us on YouTube as well. cheers,
-alex
____________________________________
Bob, It's Franke Previte . A lot of my friend have been emailing me about your article and saying you should tell Bob the story on how you wrote the song (I've had) The time of my life. So not to drag this out to long. I was working on the 4th Franke and the Knockout record. The song Hungry Eyes was already written and passed on by every label when I received a phone call from the president of the label that sold the band to MCA two years earlier. This guys names was Jimmy Ienner, he went on to tell about a movie he was working on called Dirty Dancing. My first thoughts was poor Jimmy's doing porn. He gave me a five minute description of the movie and I replied, sorry Jimmy, I'm to busy work on my next record. He replied "make time this going to change your life!" I laugh inside because he had already changed my life when he closed his label two years earlier. So here where the song writing of the song began. As history tell it, I accepted his offer and called John DeNicola whom I wrote Hungry Eyes with and John sent me a track of music and on my way to the studio in my car exit 140 on the Garden state Parkway I started to Jam to a cassette mumbling Da Da dime of my life and the next thing I knew the Man up stairs wrote the rest of the song.
When I met Patrick Swazye at the Academy Award he told they had turned down 149 and hated the movie because it did have a great ending song. They filmed the last scene first and when the last cassette came in the 150th they filmed to me singing (I've had) The time of my life with Rachele Cappelli.the only duet that was submitted. and the rest is history. Today I now sell those same demo of my two song to help raise money for Pancreatic Cancer. If you go to my Facebook page Dirty Dancing Demos you'll see me with Lisa Swayze. So please pass the word and lets all help wage war on Pancreatic Cancer.
Thanks Bob for taking the time to read my story and have a Happy and Healthy Holiday season.
Franke Previte
____________________________________
From: Theo Aronson
Subject: Willis Earl Beal
Stop what you're doing and listen to this cover by Willis Earl Beal: https://open.spotify.com/track/2B3Ns8rUJhbsboJ43yWYbV
I just discovered it thanks to this State Farm commercial on TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceK5ukiw6cc
Have you heard this shit? Fuck, thats a great cover, and it that reminded me what a great song that is. Original Simple Minds recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqoNKCCt7A
Did some deeper digging and looks like he released a couple lo-fi albums on XL Recordings back in 2012/2013 before going kinda AWOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Earl_Beal
I've got nothing to do with him, but wanted to put on your radar because that cover is the first thing of the year to give me goosebumps. Haven't found anything in his own canon that gives me the same feeling, but just a nice reminder of what a great song can do when paired with an equally great voice. First new tune of 2018 to really catch my ear.
If this commercial gets enough circulation, could this become Gary Jules "Mad World" of 2018?! Who the hell knows... Kudos to whatever came first: the music supervisor who A&Red this commercial or Willis for picking and covering this song.
Happy New Year, Bob!
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Siggi's Triple Cream
This stuff is like crack.
I was not enamored of the Siggi's Skyr Felice purchased. It reminded me of the yogurt of the early sixties, when it was a health food, before all the added sugar and pasteurization, it was not exactly sweet and not exactly bitter but not exactly satisfying.
But the nutritionist said I could eat as much of Siggi's 4% whole-milk yogurt as I wanted, as long as it was not the vanilla, which has agave, which is a no-no.
That's right, too much of conventional wisdom is wrong. Quinoa has little protein, that food special on Netflix is inane, and there's nothing wrong with fat, you need it, it makes your food taste good so you get satisfied sooner and don't overeat. So when you see those people with their carb bars and zero fat yogurt laugh.
Now the 4% whole-milk yogurt tastes much better. But there's not much of it, it comes in a flat container of 125 grams but it does have 12 grams of protein, and it was my morning yogurt of choice until...
Dedicated readers know that I'm addicted to Dannon Coffee Yogurt. That I've been known to go from store to store in search of it, like a junkie. I've spent days eating only it and trail mix, swirled together, that's my idea of satisfaction, whip one up for my last meal. But that trail mix resulted in so many broken teeth I was about to become a partner with my dentist. So, I went cold turkey on the nuts, and then my nutritionist talked about the amount of sugar and...
I stopped.
Not that she made me. I don't drink, I don't smoke, she's not a martinet, she believes I'm entitled to some pleasure, but I switched to Siggi's 4%.
Then I started adding in some walnuts. I know, I know, I've backslid, but walnuts are soft and the whole thing reminds me of what once was and I'm hoping the longer I consume it and the more distance between me and Dannon and trail mix the more I'll forget about my elixir of choice. But it's just like heroin, you can be clean for years, but then one hit will put you over, I know from experience.
But last week Instacart made a mistake, and instead of the 4% Siggi's they delivered...
THE TRIPLE CREAM!
I'm loath to tell you this, I don't want there to be a run at the markets, but this stuff is so satisfying it will put a smile on your face and make you hoard, it's that good.
They are tiny little containers. Only 114 grams. It's like sitting down with caviar, only much cheaper and much sweeter.
Yes, it's sweet.
But it's not Chobani.
Greek yogurt, love it. And I'm one of those people who believe nothing can be too sweet. But come on Chobani, you're just adding too much sugar, you're leaving health behind, but Siggi's Triple Cream...
So I open the fridge and see the Lilliputian cups and start to laugh, I ask Felice, WHAT IS THIS?
But it's all we had and I ripped off the top and dug in my spoon and...as the lone review on Amazon says:
THIS IS THE BEST YOGURT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD!
http://amzn.to/2me4u8i
Nothing this good can be good for you, so I asked the nutritionist.
She said the 4% had more protein and less fat, but I could eat two Triple Creams a day if I wanted.
And I do.
I was just at Gelson's, trying to fill my pail enough to qualify for the coupon. What did I want?
And then I saw the dairy case and my heart started to pitter-patter, I was jonesing, did they have it...THEY DID!
And as soon as I got home I ripped off the top and dug in.
It's just that damn good.
And good for you.
Well, compared to the usual sugar-laden crap.
Consider this a public service announcement.
You'll thank me.
Click on "triple cream" on the right-hand side, under "skyr." Or scroll down the page:
http://siggis.com/products/#?productSection=skyr
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I was not enamored of the Siggi's Skyr Felice purchased. It reminded me of the yogurt of the early sixties, when it was a health food, before all the added sugar and pasteurization, it was not exactly sweet and not exactly bitter but not exactly satisfying.
But the nutritionist said I could eat as much of Siggi's 4% whole-milk yogurt as I wanted, as long as it was not the vanilla, which has agave, which is a no-no.
That's right, too much of conventional wisdom is wrong. Quinoa has little protein, that food special on Netflix is inane, and there's nothing wrong with fat, you need it, it makes your food taste good so you get satisfied sooner and don't overeat. So when you see those people with their carb bars and zero fat yogurt laugh.
Now the 4% whole-milk yogurt tastes much better. But there's not much of it, it comes in a flat container of 125 grams but it does have 12 grams of protein, and it was my morning yogurt of choice until...
Dedicated readers know that I'm addicted to Dannon Coffee Yogurt. That I've been known to go from store to store in search of it, like a junkie. I've spent days eating only it and trail mix, swirled together, that's my idea of satisfaction, whip one up for my last meal. But that trail mix resulted in so many broken teeth I was about to become a partner with my dentist. So, I went cold turkey on the nuts, and then my nutritionist talked about the amount of sugar and...
I stopped.
Not that she made me. I don't drink, I don't smoke, she's not a martinet, she believes I'm entitled to some pleasure, but I switched to Siggi's 4%.
Then I started adding in some walnuts. I know, I know, I've backslid, but walnuts are soft and the whole thing reminds me of what once was and I'm hoping the longer I consume it and the more distance between me and Dannon and trail mix the more I'll forget about my elixir of choice. But it's just like heroin, you can be clean for years, but then one hit will put you over, I know from experience.
But last week Instacart made a mistake, and instead of the 4% Siggi's they delivered...
THE TRIPLE CREAM!
I'm loath to tell you this, I don't want there to be a run at the markets, but this stuff is so satisfying it will put a smile on your face and make you hoard, it's that good.
They are tiny little containers. Only 114 grams. It's like sitting down with caviar, only much cheaper and much sweeter.
Yes, it's sweet.
But it's not Chobani.
Greek yogurt, love it. And I'm one of those people who believe nothing can be too sweet. But come on Chobani, you're just adding too much sugar, you're leaving health behind, but Siggi's Triple Cream...
So I open the fridge and see the Lilliputian cups and start to laugh, I ask Felice, WHAT IS THIS?
But it's all we had and I ripped off the top and dug in my spoon and...as the lone review on Amazon says:
THIS IS THE BEST YOGURT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD!
http://amzn.to/2me4u8i
Nothing this good can be good for you, so I asked the nutritionist.
She said the 4% had more protein and less fat, but I could eat two Triple Creams a day if I wanted.
And I do.
I was just at Gelson's, trying to fill my pail enough to qualify for the coupon. What did I want?
And then I saw the dairy case and my heart started to pitter-patter, I was jonesing, did they have it...THEY DID!
And as soon as I got home I ripped off the top and dug in.
It's just that damn good.
And good for you.
Well, compared to the usual sugar-laden crap.
Consider this a public service announcement.
You'll thank me.
Click on "triple cream" on the right-hand side, under "skyr." Or scroll down the page:
http://siggis.com/products/#?productSection=skyr
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The Golden Globes
Whenever Hollywood gets together to pat itself on its back it fails to realize it's lost touch with America.
That's right, no one cares what an actor or actress has to say, they became unmoored from the public consciousness the day America got broadband, and could see their shenanigans on TMZ, ignorant hustlers inured to lifestyle, and you expect us to care?
Ironically, musicians have much more power. Or to quote the great Eddie Rosenblatt, movies when done right are larger than life, music when done right is life itself.
But the musicians have abdicated this power. Playing it safe, worried about their brand, being such outrageous outlaws that they take themselves out of contention for believability. You got shot, beat someone up and you expect us to respect you? No, you're just a cartoon, entertainment before Adult Swim, we're just watching the movie, we want to see how this all plays out.
You think there's not a cost for making vapid high concept flicks?
Or awards season fodder that no one cares about?
That respect for Hollywood royalty is so deep in the past, the hangers-on and barely-breathing don't realize it. If we want to respect someone, it will be a banker or a techie, at least they've got real money, at least they change the world. As for all of Hollywood going high tech, did you see that Jessica Alba's Honest Company is tanking? That's right, if your goal is to utilize your celebrity to extend your reach into businesses other than the one you are famous for, give up, that paradigm is so aughts. If you think you can compete with the Big Four you're delusional. Then again, they do call Hollywood the Dream Factory.
Hell, if it wasn't the dead of winter no one would be watching this show. People are home, in their cocoon, they'll wrap themselves up and watch this meaningless dreck, an awards show even more fake than those perpetrated on us by Dick Clark. How many members are there of the Hollywood Foreign Press again? As for "Mrs. Maisel," I watched it, and it's one step above sitcom, and not a big one, great sets, great acting, bogus script. Remember when "Mozart In The Jungle" won? That's the last time I heard anybody mention that show.
As for Queen Oprah...
SHE'S RETIRED! Today you have to be in the public eye 24/7, and she's not, she's old and over the hill, not because she's a woman, but because time marches on and in Hollywood where you think you're young forever the truth is you're not, even if you've gotten plastic surgery.
So we've got to hear the left wing press and movers and shakers, the sycophants, say she should run for President. Give me a break, we already saw this movie, after Jesse Ventura, the public realizes its mistake and returns to professionals, at least smart people. I mean the hoi polloi can learn too. Do you really think we're gonna elect Mark Cuban? Then again, he's got more business experience.
And is the problem with sexual harassment limited to Hollywood? Who's standing up for the common person, who's digging down deep in the trenches for solutions? Chappelle says not to forget men, without them there's no progress, Daphne Merkin talks about due process, but we're giving all this ink to a bunch of primpers in black? Insane.
So a publicity release press, and that's what they all are, even the NYT and WSJ, will fawn all over this irrelevant event as if it had meaning, impact, when the truth is it's already been forgotten, in a world where you don't even get a day in the news cycle.
Meanwhile, we get all this self-congratulatory pomp from Hollywood. The same enterprise that makes you subscribe to umpteen services to see what you want, overcharges for movie tickets and then bitches when we cut the cord and refuse to go to movies that get bad ratings on RottenTomatoes. Come on, this is a cabal that's driving straight towards a cliff and doesn't even realize it, other than Rupert Murdoch, who sold Twenty First Century to Disney, realizing the worm has turned and it's only going to get worse. Then again, Disney has the faltering ESPN and thinks its brand name can compete with Netflix. How do you like that Motorola phone? Your Nokia? Buy anything made by Sony recently?
If you're a fashionista, by all means watch this bore and be satisfied.
If you're a fan of comedy, know that Seth Meyers has a miniscule audience and gets no respect from anybody under 30, but you can't say anything negative about a Lorne Michaels protege.
But if you're taking the temperature of America, not only did you have no need to watch this show, you don't have to read the press, check out the winners, nothing, it's irrelevant in life today, where you're the star and you're worried about your own influence and relationships and you can't take your eyes off of D.C. Hell, if Hollywood is so powerful how come Trump won? When other than Chachi, no celebrity would show up for him? Seems he had his finger on the pulse much more than the entertainment industrial complex, which refuses to believe it built him and loves the ratings that come with covering him.
Talk about taking no responsibility.
Do you think Logan Paul's fans care you castigated him for his video in the suicide forest? Hell, he was wrong, but he didn't even need to apologize, his fans had no problem with it.
And C. Delores Tucker and her ilk got Warner to blow out Interscope which promptly became the biggest label in the business and now hip-hop dominates and did you even get that reference, do you even know who that is?
Maybe if Jimmy Iovine foisted the Globes on all of our iPhones like he did U2, maybe then there would be an effect, but it would be OUTRAGE!
The truth is you can turn off the TV, you don't have to follow the news, but the people who print every day, who are part of the complex, just don't get it that the game has changed.
Celebrity has been devalued. Managing your impact is now completely different.
And just because you tell us something, that does not make it so.
So Oprah can go to sleep basking in all the accolades.
Meanwhile, where's my good-paying job? If I blow the whistle on my boss I'll get fired. How am I gonna pay for health care?
Who cares about me?
Certainly not the people on TV.
Daphne Merkin - "Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately We Have Misgivings": http://nyti.ms/2Ea49Ka
"No Longer A Unicorn, Jessica Alba's Honest Co. Struggles to Grow": http://on.wsj.com/2m3MLAh
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That's right, no one cares what an actor or actress has to say, they became unmoored from the public consciousness the day America got broadband, and could see their shenanigans on TMZ, ignorant hustlers inured to lifestyle, and you expect us to care?
Ironically, musicians have much more power. Or to quote the great Eddie Rosenblatt, movies when done right are larger than life, music when done right is life itself.
But the musicians have abdicated this power. Playing it safe, worried about their brand, being such outrageous outlaws that they take themselves out of contention for believability. You got shot, beat someone up and you expect us to respect you? No, you're just a cartoon, entertainment before Adult Swim, we're just watching the movie, we want to see how this all plays out.
You think there's not a cost for making vapid high concept flicks?
Or awards season fodder that no one cares about?
That respect for Hollywood royalty is so deep in the past, the hangers-on and barely-breathing don't realize it. If we want to respect someone, it will be a banker or a techie, at least they've got real money, at least they change the world. As for all of Hollywood going high tech, did you see that Jessica Alba's Honest Company is tanking? That's right, if your goal is to utilize your celebrity to extend your reach into businesses other than the one you are famous for, give up, that paradigm is so aughts. If you think you can compete with the Big Four you're delusional. Then again, they do call Hollywood the Dream Factory.
Hell, if it wasn't the dead of winter no one would be watching this show. People are home, in their cocoon, they'll wrap themselves up and watch this meaningless dreck, an awards show even more fake than those perpetrated on us by Dick Clark. How many members are there of the Hollywood Foreign Press again? As for "Mrs. Maisel," I watched it, and it's one step above sitcom, and not a big one, great sets, great acting, bogus script. Remember when "Mozart In The Jungle" won? That's the last time I heard anybody mention that show.
As for Queen Oprah...
SHE'S RETIRED! Today you have to be in the public eye 24/7, and she's not, she's old and over the hill, not because she's a woman, but because time marches on and in Hollywood where you think you're young forever the truth is you're not, even if you've gotten plastic surgery.
So we've got to hear the left wing press and movers and shakers, the sycophants, say she should run for President. Give me a break, we already saw this movie, after Jesse Ventura, the public realizes its mistake and returns to professionals, at least smart people. I mean the hoi polloi can learn too. Do you really think we're gonna elect Mark Cuban? Then again, he's got more business experience.
And is the problem with sexual harassment limited to Hollywood? Who's standing up for the common person, who's digging down deep in the trenches for solutions? Chappelle says not to forget men, without them there's no progress, Daphne Merkin talks about due process, but we're giving all this ink to a bunch of primpers in black? Insane.
So a publicity release press, and that's what they all are, even the NYT and WSJ, will fawn all over this irrelevant event as if it had meaning, impact, when the truth is it's already been forgotten, in a world where you don't even get a day in the news cycle.
Meanwhile, we get all this self-congratulatory pomp from Hollywood. The same enterprise that makes you subscribe to umpteen services to see what you want, overcharges for movie tickets and then bitches when we cut the cord and refuse to go to movies that get bad ratings on RottenTomatoes. Come on, this is a cabal that's driving straight towards a cliff and doesn't even realize it, other than Rupert Murdoch, who sold Twenty First Century to Disney, realizing the worm has turned and it's only going to get worse. Then again, Disney has the faltering ESPN and thinks its brand name can compete with Netflix. How do you like that Motorola phone? Your Nokia? Buy anything made by Sony recently?
If you're a fashionista, by all means watch this bore and be satisfied.
If you're a fan of comedy, know that Seth Meyers has a miniscule audience and gets no respect from anybody under 30, but you can't say anything negative about a Lorne Michaels protege.
But if you're taking the temperature of America, not only did you have no need to watch this show, you don't have to read the press, check out the winners, nothing, it's irrelevant in life today, where you're the star and you're worried about your own influence and relationships and you can't take your eyes off of D.C. Hell, if Hollywood is so powerful how come Trump won? When other than Chachi, no celebrity would show up for him? Seems he had his finger on the pulse much more than the entertainment industrial complex, which refuses to believe it built him and loves the ratings that come with covering him.
Talk about taking no responsibility.
Do you think Logan Paul's fans care you castigated him for his video in the suicide forest? Hell, he was wrong, but he didn't even need to apologize, his fans had no problem with it.
And C. Delores Tucker and her ilk got Warner to blow out Interscope which promptly became the biggest label in the business and now hip-hop dominates and did you even get that reference, do you even know who that is?
Maybe if Jimmy Iovine foisted the Globes on all of our iPhones like he did U2, maybe then there would be an effect, but it would be OUTRAGE!
The truth is you can turn off the TV, you don't have to follow the news, but the people who print every day, who are part of the complex, just don't get it that the game has changed.
Celebrity has been devalued. Managing your impact is now completely different.
And just because you tell us something, that does not make it so.
So Oprah can go to sleep basking in all the accolades.
Meanwhile, where's my good-paying job? If I blow the whistle on my boss I'll get fired. How am I gonna pay for health care?
Who cares about me?
Certainly not the people on TV.
Daphne Merkin - "Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately We Have Misgivings": http://nyti.ms/2Ea49Ka
"No Longer A Unicorn, Jessica Alba's Honest Co. Struggles to Grow": http://on.wsj.com/2m3MLAh
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Sunday 7 January 2018
Marry Me
http://spoti.fi/2CQufWy
http://bit.ly/2kHE11h
The one who got away.
The Brothers Osborne were WAILING! Their new track "Shoot Me Straight" was playing atop Spotify's Hot Country playlist and I was wondering why all the rockers lamenting the death of their format were not listening to this. Sure, the band was not breaking new ground, but this was a natural extension of what once was in the classic era more than all that derivative hogwash on the Active Rock format, the Brothers Osborne could single-handedly bring back the art of the guitar.
Maybe.
Did you read that article about the guy eaten by an alligator recommended by David Brooks? You absolutely should, because it illustrates how the other half lives. You think everybody's just like you, trying to get ahead, taking enrichment courses, to get into a good college, or bitching that the system is screwing them, but there's a plethora of people who barely make it out of high school, if they do at all, and go into jobs of manual labor and live to drink and are not complaining but have contempt for you, and that's what's wrong with the country right there, a misunderstanding of how everybody lives their life. And, unfortunately, the media usually misses all this. Just like it missed hip-hop, and now says that hip-hop rules.
It does.
Because it embraced the internet.
Thomas Rhett's "Marry Me" is slowly climbing up the Mediabase chart, even though it was a hit on the day it was released, which is why it's number two on the Spotify Hot Country playlist.
"She wants to get married, she wants it perfect
She wants her granddaddy preaching the service
Yeah, she wants magnolias out in the country
Not too many people, save her daddy some money"
Another sappy country song about love, I've got it, even though the melody is enticing.
That's what's wrong with too much country music, it plays it safe, speaks to a market, does its best to be inoffensive, but that's business, not art, art is truth, it comes from the inside.
"Ooh, she got it all planned out
Yeah, I can see it all right now"
Seemingly every girl has this fantasy, despite their demeanor.
"I'll wear my black suit, black tie, hide out in the back
I'll do a strong shot of whiskey straight out the flask
I'll try to make it through without crying so nobody sees
Yeah, she wanna get married
But she don't wanna marry me"
HUH???????
Wait a second, this is just a typical small town lower middle class southern story and then...
Suddenly it's EVERYBODY'S STORY!
No one compromises in hip-hop, no one saves anybody any money. No one wants to do it small, but everybody gets their heart broken.
Maybe it's your first love. Maybe it's the first person you had sex with. Forty years later I've got a friend who laments the one he lost his virginity to, he stalks her online, sees her new life, wants to contact her, but is afraid of her husband and two kids.
As he should be.
He's convinced if he was with her he'd be happy.
We're all looking for happiness.
What would it have been like?
Sometimes you had a relationship, sometimes a connection, sometimes just a crush. You played it out in your brain, what it would be like with them. And usually you get old enough and you realize this is not the way it works, that they really didn't slip away, they just took a different path, and you'll find your person, you just have to keep searching.
"I remember the night when I almost kissed her
Yeah, kinda freaked me out, we'd been friends for forever
And I always wondered if she felt the same way
When I got the invite, I knew it was too late"
Those moments of intimacy. Are they sexual or just friendship? If only you could stop the movie and speak the truth, but you can't do this. You go by feel, you've got to step up to the plate, but you're afraid if she doesn't feel the same way it's gonna ruin it. Forever.
"And I know her daddy's been dreading this day
Oh, but he don't know he ain't the only one giving her away"
What a great couplet! Where does this daddy stuff come from? So insightful. He's her little girl, he's got to let go.
But so does he.
But what seals the deal is the chorus.
He's in his black suit, out in the back, drinking straight from the flask, you can picture it.
But you can also sing it.
In a whisper as you're navigating traffic.
In the bar with your friends as it comes over the jukebox.
With your honey lying on the couch.
That's music. The kind that used to dominate. Universal messages conveyed in not only a way we can all relate, but that we can all sing along with.
Thomas Rhett is burning up the chart, he's got a string of hits. But he's not changing what he does for dominance, not modifying what he does to be pop, because that's death, there's a dearth of pop his on the radio these days, but these country songs are getting bigger and bigger, they're the ones that are making inroads on streaming, every cut on Thomas Rhett's 2017 album "Life Changes" has more than a million streams on Spotify, many double-digit millions, "Craving You" 73+ million and "Marry Me" already almost 18 million. This music is resonating, but in a backwater without attention.
But that's gonna change.
Brothers Osborne "Shoot Me Straight": http://spoti.fi/2makF6C, http://bit.ly/2m6FDSV
Gator story: http://bzfd.it/2FaiA26
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http://bit.ly/2kHE11h
The one who got away.
The Brothers Osborne were WAILING! Their new track "Shoot Me Straight" was playing atop Spotify's Hot Country playlist and I was wondering why all the rockers lamenting the death of their format were not listening to this. Sure, the band was not breaking new ground, but this was a natural extension of what once was in the classic era more than all that derivative hogwash on the Active Rock format, the Brothers Osborne could single-handedly bring back the art of the guitar.
Maybe.
Did you read that article about the guy eaten by an alligator recommended by David Brooks? You absolutely should, because it illustrates how the other half lives. You think everybody's just like you, trying to get ahead, taking enrichment courses, to get into a good college, or bitching that the system is screwing them, but there's a plethora of people who barely make it out of high school, if they do at all, and go into jobs of manual labor and live to drink and are not complaining but have contempt for you, and that's what's wrong with the country right there, a misunderstanding of how everybody lives their life. And, unfortunately, the media usually misses all this. Just like it missed hip-hop, and now says that hip-hop rules.
It does.
Because it embraced the internet.
Thomas Rhett's "Marry Me" is slowly climbing up the Mediabase chart, even though it was a hit on the day it was released, which is why it's number two on the Spotify Hot Country playlist.
"She wants to get married, she wants it perfect
She wants her granddaddy preaching the service
Yeah, she wants magnolias out in the country
Not too many people, save her daddy some money"
Another sappy country song about love, I've got it, even though the melody is enticing.
That's what's wrong with too much country music, it plays it safe, speaks to a market, does its best to be inoffensive, but that's business, not art, art is truth, it comes from the inside.
"Ooh, she got it all planned out
Yeah, I can see it all right now"
Seemingly every girl has this fantasy, despite their demeanor.
"I'll wear my black suit, black tie, hide out in the back
I'll do a strong shot of whiskey straight out the flask
I'll try to make it through without crying so nobody sees
Yeah, she wanna get married
But she don't wanna marry me"
HUH???????
Wait a second, this is just a typical small town lower middle class southern story and then...
Suddenly it's EVERYBODY'S STORY!
No one compromises in hip-hop, no one saves anybody any money. No one wants to do it small, but everybody gets their heart broken.
Maybe it's your first love. Maybe it's the first person you had sex with. Forty years later I've got a friend who laments the one he lost his virginity to, he stalks her online, sees her new life, wants to contact her, but is afraid of her husband and two kids.
As he should be.
He's convinced if he was with her he'd be happy.
We're all looking for happiness.
What would it have been like?
Sometimes you had a relationship, sometimes a connection, sometimes just a crush. You played it out in your brain, what it would be like with them. And usually you get old enough and you realize this is not the way it works, that they really didn't slip away, they just took a different path, and you'll find your person, you just have to keep searching.
"I remember the night when I almost kissed her
Yeah, kinda freaked me out, we'd been friends for forever
And I always wondered if she felt the same way
When I got the invite, I knew it was too late"
Those moments of intimacy. Are they sexual or just friendship? If only you could stop the movie and speak the truth, but you can't do this. You go by feel, you've got to step up to the plate, but you're afraid if she doesn't feel the same way it's gonna ruin it. Forever.
"And I know her daddy's been dreading this day
Oh, but he don't know he ain't the only one giving her away"
What a great couplet! Where does this daddy stuff come from? So insightful. He's her little girl, he's got to let go.
But so does he.
But what seals the deal is the chorus.
He's in his black suit, out in the back, drinking straight from the flask, you can picture it.
But you can also sing it.
In a whisper as you're navigating traffic.
In the bar with your friends as it comes over the jukebox.
With your honey lying on the couch.
That's music. The kind that used to dominate. Universal messages conveyed in not only a way we can all relate, but that we can all sing along with.
Thomas Rhett is burning up the chart, he's got a string of hits. But he's not changing what he does for dominance, not modifying what he does to be pop, because that's death, there's a dearth of pop his on the radio these days, but these country songs are getting bigger and bigger, they're the ones that are making inroads on streaming, every cut on Thomas Rhett's 2017 album "Life Changes" has more than a million streams on Spotify, many double-digit millions, "Craving You" 73+ million and "Marry Me" already almost 18 million. This music is resonating, but in a backwater without attention.
But that's gonna change.
Brothers Osborne "Shoot Me Straight": http://spoti.fi/2makF6C, http://bit.ly/2m6FDSV
Gator story: http://bzfd.it/2FaiA26
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Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
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