Last night I was prevented from falling asleep by the book "Strange Brew: Eric Clapton & The British Blues Boom 1965-1970".  It had a day by day recounting of the travails of not only E.C., but John Mayall and Peter Green, with an interweaving of every other British blues musician of the era.  And I’m frantically looking through the book, to see if the Cream date I attended in Wallingford, Connecticut is there, at the Oakdale tent.  Problem is, I can’t remember exactly what month it was.  But I eventually found it, on June 15, 1968.  And I also found the gig at the New Haven Arena the following fall, where I stood fewer than ten feet away as Cream played with the ferocity I anticipated the previous spring but had not experienced, and I recorded the entire proceedings on the Norelco cassette deck I snuck inside.

It’s not the same.

Or maybe it is, maybe that’s why I’m writing this.

You see music was the Internet of the sixties.  People got the bug and couldn’t get enough.  Both players and listeners, both coders and surfers.  There was a pulse, a heartbeat that was ignored at first by the mainstream.  Eric and Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck didn’t do it to get rich, they followed the music.  Sure, their playing spoke for them, allowed them to attract the opposite sex, but the music itself was the driver.  And the music infected the public at large.

You’d be stunned how much Cream played in America.  And not every gig was a success.  It was impossible to get noticed.  And as their career grew it was like video games in the first era of Nintendo, the cultists were intrigued, their parents pooh-poohed.

We wanted to know everything about our bands.  The family trees led us to other acts.  There was no TMZ, no PerezHilton, we only found out how famous these musicians truly were when Woodstock happened and it turned out EVERYBODY was into the music.

But not everybody’s into the music anymore.

Never forget that popular music was in a trough, an incredible downturn prior to MTV.  People were tired of the shenanigans, corporate rock, mindless disco, everything the music stood for in the sixties was gone.  Now it was only about making money, and the public moved on.

But MTV had a vibrancy akin to the underground FM radio stations.  It was run by the lunatics, not the guards.  And although musical experimentation was limited, visual risks were taken daily, to the point where all movies and television were affected by the MTV style.

But then we hit an artistic nadir.  Rather than innovation, we got slickness.  We had the Web as an alternative, and the golden era died.

People still want to bring the golden era back.

Let me tell you how this Web works.  Millions are surfing every day, and they’re linking to and e-mailing what they think is good.  And when I get the same story ten times, I take notice.  Be sure to read the following:

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

I know it’s long, but this is the story of the music business too.  The goal was to bring the old world into the new, preserving all its elements.  This is impossible. And what we’ve got now is cultural chaos.

So U2 can open the Grammys, play Letterman for a week and fly for quick gigs to multiple cities and not only are their first week sales about half of those for their 2004 album, in the second week there’s a dramatic drop.  Yes, according to hitsdailydouble.com,  this week U2’s "No Line On The Horizon" is number 3, having sold 124,958 copies, a drop of 74%!

Nobody wants it.  It’s not about quality, people are just interested in something different, they don’t want to spend the time with U2’s album.  They’re interested in other things, other bands, they believe they’ve got enough U2 music.

Tour demand will be great.  That’s a different animal.  It’s a celebration of the CAREER of U2.  Yet, despite the gross, not that many people will go, not when you compare the number of attendees with the number of people living in America.

In other words, music is narrowcasting once again.  Rail about piracy, but that’s not the issue, that only has to do with monetization.  We had those gargantuan sales in the eighties and nineties because everyone was paying attention to the same outlet, MTV.  Hell, radio aligned its playlists with what the television giant was airing.  But we no longer have one dictator.  We have a plethora of outlets and a plethora of bands.  If you’re about the sell, your words are falling on deaf ears, people just don’t care.  They’ve got to be infected by the music, which is extremely difficult to do.  You’ve got to record great stuff and hope your audience spreads the word.

But U2’s audience has stopped talking about the music.  U2’s audience is as calcified as the one for the dinosaur acts touring the sheds, from Chicago to Earth, Wind & Fire to even Styx and Def Leppard.  U2’s audience is fortysomethings wanting to relive their college days.  And if you’re not in your forties yourself, not only do you not care, you’re turned off by the ravings of these lumpy parents.

As opposed to Bob Dylan.  People care about his new album because not only did they not have to wait for it forever, not only was there no extreme advance hype, but Dylan is known for taking chances.  Like his shows.  They’re cheap, but you never know what you’ll get.  Dylan’s still alive, too many bands are perceived as dead.

Will Dylan’s album be a blockbuster?

Probably not.

But Dylan’s a musician, not a star.  He’s not trying to preserve his status so much as doing his job, making music, taking chances all the way.

It’s your chances that endear us to you.

Or else it’s Britney or Madonna or…  And we’re only going for the spectacle, it’s got nothing to do with music.  The Spice Girls proved no one cares about the spectacle ten years out.  The Allman Brothers are proving people still care about the music, how it lives and breathes and changes every night, at their stand at the Beacon right now.

If you want to be a star, be my guest.  E-mail Perez, compliment him and give him an exclusive.

If you want to be a musician, take chances.  Worry less about hits than aural adventures.  Create something new, and different, that’s intriguing, with rough edges that can hook listeners.

That’s what you do with music, listen.

We didn’t need pyrotechnics to draw people to see Cream.  The music was enough.  It still is.  If you’re good and you see yourself practicing an honest profession, one that feeds your family, but doesn’t buy you a private jet.  We need bankers. But when they ruin our economy and believe they’re entitled to millions, we’re turned off.  We need musicians.  But when they believe they’re entitled to live like princes, trading on decades-old laurels, we’re disgusted and look for something new.  Something vibrant.  Which may not even be music.  But we’re always susceptible to something aural.  If it tickles our ears, makes us feel all warm and fuzzy, removes us from this dreary life and makes us believe we live in one that’s better.

That’s what Eric Clapton and the great British axemen did.  They took us away.  And it wasn’t about their looks, or the production, but the music.  It’s got to be that way in order for music to drive the culture once again.