Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together try to love one another
Right now
Right now
RIGHT NOW!

“Get Together”
The Youngbloods

And the press said not to be afraid of Donald Trump, that he was ineffectual, and Paul Ryan was a small thinker, that they could nominate Supreme Court Justices but not break the government…

WRONG!

This is what I hate about today’s America, you’ve got no idea what’s going on. The elites were unaware of the working or out-of-work class and the right wing has its megaphone and is not listening to the left and everybody’s blaming fake news when the problem is real news, and people living in echo chambers, unaware of what the other guy is saying.

Didn’t used to be this way.

Not because of the Fairness Doctrine, not because of fewer media outlets, but because of the makeup of our society.

Remember “Peace and Love”? Seems like the only person still saying that is Ringo, and the days of listening to your rock star to tell you which way the wind blows died when MTV made performers richer than their wildest dreams and then the techies came along and ate their lunch, literally with Napster and figuratively as in how much richer the coders can be.

So we’re sitting in the mud, listening to the Airplane, playing air guitar to Hendrix, sharing our food, looking out for one another, Max Yasgur tells us how amazing it is that we can all get together for three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music and then Reagan goes and blows a hole in the whole damn thing.

I just took a huge risk there in case you don’t know. By mentioning the exalted one’s name. You might think he was a dementia-ridden, astrology-abiding, grandfatherly nitwit, but to a whole swath of Americans he’s god. He single-handedly stopped Communism and he denigrated the government and gave the power and the money back to the people and harmony reigned forever more, until that black guy became President and ruined it, which is kind of amazing if you think about it, since that black guy was a centrist and he didn’t control Congress for most of his tenure and you might think this is about racism but this is really about a redefining of what America’s about, which is I’m gonna grab mine, SCREW YOU!

As if the rich aren’t rich enough.

That’s the problem in America today, income inequality, but if you say that the right wing claims CLASS WARFARE! But why should that scare you, aren’t classes just divisions amongst ourselves?

And the point here is by mentioning Reagan and “class warfare” my inbox will go berserk with people telling me how wrong I am and I have no respect. Used to be the African-Americans would tolerate no taunt, now it’s the white right wing. And if you think about it, Huey and the Panthers did a lot to give their community respect. And now Trump is enabling everybody on the other side, who just want the foreigners to go home and the ethnicities to shut up, so they can all go home and shoot opioids and revel in their freedom.

Not that the left doesn’t push it too far. Did you see that story in the “Times” about vocal coaching for transgendered people? I’m all for transgender rights, vocal coaching is cool with me, but when you’re losing the World Series you don’t start worrying about your bench, making sure the hitters far down the line are ready, YOU FOCUS ON THOSE WHO ARE GONNA PLAY! As in the left wing just does not know how to prioritize, doesn’t know how to subordinate the little stuff to focus on the big stuff. Furthermore, the left is myopic, they’ve got no idea how anybody other than themselves live, and they’re contemptuous of others.

Everybody in America has got contempt for everybody else. And we can’t agree on the facts. It’s as if in that aforementioned World Series the National League team believes it’s winning by 3-2 and the American believes it’s winning by 2-1, how do you even start, how do you even play the game?

As for the rules, even Congress just changed those. Which is how Gorsuch got his seat. A guy who wasted no time in making his views known, swaying decisions 5-4.

So I’m pretty depressed.

We don’t listen to the same music, we don’t go to the same schools, Betsy DeVos is about vouchers when the latest statistics say they actually cause scores to go DOWN and the truth is it’s all about religious education, getting the government to pay for it, and now we’re not even studying the same stuff.

And the President just stands up and lies. After all, he’s an entertainer, and they lie for a living.

And no one can lose their job, everybody wants to protect what they have, and there’s no cohesiveness whatsoever.

I’d love to tell you how it all works out, but I’m clueless. I can document the change, how we got here, but I feel powerless and there are no leaders on the left and like I said, the news outlets keep telling us not to worry, it can’t happen her, BUT THEN IT DOES!

Ryan can’t get his bill passed.

But he does.

Well now it can’t get through the Senate.

WANNA BET?

And this doesn’t even apply to me. I pay beaucoup bucks for a PPO with a multiple four grand deductible because of preexisting conditions but I want this level of service. The thought that I’m paying five figures a year and therefore everybody else should be screwed never crosses my mind. I’m worried about the disadvantaged, those who’ve lost their jobs, been the victims of unforeseen health problems and yes, maybe that single mother shouldn’t have had that kid, but we’re gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater, is that what we Americans do?

I know, I know, we can’t get everything we want, we have to compromise.

But the joke is on the left. I voted for Barry and I’m down with him, but let’s not forget that on his watch the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress and all those governorships. I live in California, but the rest of the country is pretty damn red. Good luck having that union look out for you, the union is DEAD!

Because the unions are the problem.

The tort lawyers are the problem.

The government is the problem.

No, we are the problem. We’re every one of those people. Just like every family has a gay member, we’ve all got relatives all over the place, in all walks of life, working for the man or being an entrepreneur, advantaged or less so.

The problem is us.

And we’re gonna have to metabolize the effects of President Trump and his cronies ourselves. The media ain’t gonna save us. Hell, half the people benefiting from the programs Trump wants to cut don’t even know it. How many years is it gonna take them to realize this and get their voices heard, and what will be lost along the way?

And all these marches, they don’t seem to be making a difference, they’re too vague, whereas a town hall where you complain, make an elected official worry about his gig, those seem to have an effect, so maybe we need more targeted protest.

Or maybe whatever we do makes no difference.

The truth is we’re all in it together.

But no one in America believes that anymore.

America is a great place if you’re rich.

And if you ain’t?

Not so much.

They didn’t know what they were doing.

All those legendary hits, played ad infinitum on transistors way back when and Sirius today? The creators were just trying to get ahead, they were just trying to get paid.

I’ve been sifting through books and I came across “What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?: Memoirs of a life in music,” by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg.

P.F. Sloan, the guy who wrote “Eve of Destruction,” right?

The dirty little secret of these rock bios is they’re terrible. Interesting subject matter, with too often too little revealed (can you say Linda Ronstadt?), but they’re poorly written and even when the celebrity is involved there are glaring factual mistakes and agendas and my plan was just to skim it and toss it, but then I got hooked.

P.F. Sloan hated Lou Adler. Now Lou only gets good press these days, even though he’s been out of the game for eons. He’s the legend that goes to Laker games. But he’s just a guy screwing him in Sloan’s eyes. And Adler went on to much greater success, whereas after Lou…crickets for P.F.

So P.F. is paired up with Steve Barri, who he feels responsible for, since Barri is married with a kid. And neither of those are their real last names, hell, Sloan’s dad renamed the clan from “Schlein” after leaving New York for Los Angeles and there was no big plan, Sloan and Barri didn’t want to become legends, they wanted to SURVIVE!

We forget once upon a time music was a backward business peopled by thieves and crooks where the records came and went and if you were involved you might end up with some fame but very little money.

This is so different from today. Where constructing a hit single is like building a skyscraper. Nothing’s done on a whim, except by the wannabes, but it used to be that those on the bottom could not get a chance, recording deals were rare, so they worked.

They worked as recently as the nineties.

As you are probably aware, Col. Bruce Hampton died on stage this week. And I can’t help thinking how I saw him with Phish back in ’92. And I’m looking up the gig and I’m stunned, Phish is playing across the country every night. With no major record deal and no fame, they were building it as they want along.

But now you cannot do that, because there’s nowhere to play. The clubs have disappeared and those that still exist want deejays and no one will tolerate mediocrity, never mind new music. The audience wants all hits all the time and if you don’t provide them they’ll just immerse themselves in their mobile devices, shutting you out.

So Col. Bruce Hampton paid his dues. I forgot that he was in the Hampton Grease Band, but remembered he opened for the Mothers at the Fillmore, used to see their name on the poster, in an era where you had no chance of hearing most records released, your department store didn’t rack them and you couldn’t afford them.

And Hampton played with Zappa and formed the Aquarium Rescue Unit with ultimately famous players and kept on working until his 70th birthday party which turned into a wake. He never got rich, didn’t even get famous. But if you follow musicians, it was a veritable who’s who who showed up to pay tribute to him the other night.

That’s the way you used to do it, formed a band and hit the road and if you were any good you got more bookings and you got high and got laid and some people dropped out and some sustained and ended up being able to do the same thing today, even though you wonder if you should be home with your wife and kids. This is the life you chose. You can barely even choose this life anymore.

But in P.F. Sloan’s era it was different. There was no glamour. Believe me, everybody didn’t want to be a rock star before the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, what you heard on the radio was ENTERTAINMENT!

But someone had to make it. Someone had to work for bupkes writing songs.

And most of these songs were shite. But you choose a line of work and get better by doing it and then get to know everybody and opportunity opens up. In this case, with Jan & Dean, Adler’s other charges.

But then Sloan starts talking about the studio. Not only the players, but the engineers. What their skills were. Using limiters. How Jan Berry employed multiple units to get that sound and suddenly you’re hooked, you want to go deeper, you just can’t get enough, this is what you lived for.

Yes, we lived to go to Manny’s to look at the guitars.

We wanted to know everybody in the credits. We wanted to know the tricks, how the magic was created.

And you didn’t need a famous father, you didn’t even need an education or money to participate, you just had to move to L.A. and move through the social network, only this one wasn’t online, but virtual. And I’ll tell you every damn day that today is better than yesterday, I don’t want to go back to the pre-internet era with its loneliness and its boredom, but something’s been lost in the transition, kinda like when cars lost their vent windows to a/c… Every once in a while you just want to open the vent.

And if you lived through this era, the early to mid-sixties, you remember. Going to school, having crushes, and being addicted to the radio. EVERYBODY knew the hits, a number one track is a fraction of what it was back then. You felt part of a group, a movement, a tide.

And it was all based on the music and interacting. It wasn’t about accumulating likes but being real friends, actually knowing people that could move you down the board. And when Sloan talks about being locked out of the arena in Hawaii at a Beach Boys and more gig… You resonate. You haven’t played in Hollywood unless you’ve felt left out. He was the bass player, but his friend Carl Wilson, who he hung with in the studio, didn’t remember him. He was scheduled to play but he couldn’t get inside, how big a deal was he? How big a deal are you? How big a deal am I?

And the recently departed Bob Krasnow worked at a label called Domain which begged Adler for songs. Used to be songs were everything and acts didn’t write their own and Krasnow, et al, were always puffing up their image, pontificating about nonexistent sales, because you fake it to make it, truly.

As for the studio cats, Sloan delineates their qualities, their essence, the way Leon Russell could play octave notes on the piano with his left hand and it made all the difference. He was not the Master of Space & Time, he was a studio cat making a living, not getting rich, but having fun.

And then Sloan hears a voice and writes five hit songs in a night. Including “Eve of Destruction.” Who knows where inspiration comes from. Who knows how whacked our heroes are. Hell, this is the same guy who says he sold fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after he died. And we fans can never get over the fact that our heroes are done. They had hits once, now they no longer do. Styles change, people lose the muse, but the truth is music is a business of luck and it runs out very quickly, be stunned you make it at all.

And the people in this book were stunned. They were building an edifice, the foundations of classic rock, music that has lasted forever, and they thought they were building cheap motels that wouldn’t last a decade. Hell, Peter Grant sold out Zeppelin’s catalogue, who’d want to listen to that music decades hence?

And reading Sloan’s book I realize as much as I know I don’t know anything, about the music business, about life. There is no master plan. You just march forward and try to make the best of the opportunities. And when you’re changing the world, you think you’re just earning a living. It’s only with hindsight that you can see what you accomplished. All the rules and regulations, the restrictions you carped about, ironically led to your success. They channeled your efforts and when they were truly inane, you revolted, like Terry Melcher and Sloan, who locked out the Columbia engineer when he wouldn’t link up the echo chambers, they figured they had an hour to make “Mr. Tambourine Man” work themselves.

And they did. With a lot of reverb and effects. Same performances, same basic tracks, but the tweaks turned it into a hit.

I’ve got no idea if Lou Adler is a good guy or a bad one, I don’t know him well enough. But I do know that Brian Epstein sent out a promo kit trying to get someone to release the Beatles in America, and when Sloan liked the four tracks Epstein told Andrew Loog Oldham to send on the Stones. You see it was just that simple, serendipity. And the business was smaller. You knew the players and were not inundated with product.

And you didn’t think you were changing the world.

But you were.

What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?: Memoirs of a life in music

When was the last time you changed your word processor? Remember arguing over WordPerfect and WordStar? Maybe you were a fan of the Mac-only WriteNow. But now you just use Word, or some notes app, maybe something built-in, Google Docs, something that is free. The point being we saw decades of constant evolution, tumult, change, and then it all stopped. Now maybe word processors will be superseded, by collaborative tools like Slack, but you give not a thought to your word processor of choice, assuming you pay at all.

That’s another thing that’s gone by the wayside. Used to be you needed not only a word processor, but a standalone spell-checker. Then spell-checking and all the rest of the add-ons were baked into the behemoth word processing programs and the little companies disappeared. Hell, even the little mobile app companies have disappeared. Hell, software in general, the kind you buy, is a moribund field.

Change happens.

But so does consolidation.

We were so busy watching the movie, jumping from stone to stone, from Friendster to MySpace to…that we thought it would never stop. We believed this was the way of the world. The internet begat constant refinement, innovation, we were wowed on a regular basis. Then we saw no need to replace our iPad, our mobile phones lasted a lot longer, almost no one buys a desktop computer and the laptop you own, unless the company gives you a new one, provides service for the better part of a decade.

Yesterday Facebook delivered astounding numbers. But most of the talk on the street is negative. Commentators want the social network to solve the unsolvable. Decades on we still have e-mail spam, we’ve never been able to eradicate piracy, but somehow Facebook should be able to cleanse its system of all heinous activity and provide a fair and balanced look at the world.

Never gonna happen. No matter how much money Zuckerberg throws at the problem.

And before the brouhaha about Live, the advertising community was up-in-arms about metrics. If Facebook was so bad, wouldn’t you pull your spots?

But no, Facebook is the new network TV, the one of yore, before cable, when there were only three outlets, you bitched about the content, you bitched about the price, but Madison Avenue overpaid for the privilege of reaching its customers, network TV was nearly the only game in town, it blew everything else away in terms of reach and effectiveness.

But now it’s even worse. Because newspapers and magazines, those that still exist, pay fewer dividends than ever before. And other than Google, so much online advertising is pissing in the wind, you just pays Facebook and hope for the best.

No one saw this coming. No one saw the consolidation in power. No one saw this rise in power. No one saw the calcification of systems.

But that is where we are.

And one can argue this concentration of power is even more important than what’s happening in D.C. Because just like politicians learned you got elected on television, now the populace pays attention on the internet. So if you’re not Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook, you’re not in the game, you’re irrelevant.

And it’s funny how the same people complaining about Facebook are lauding Apple. Is it because those running Apple are older and more experienced? Is it because Facebook is always testing the limits? Is it because you denigrate the newbie and laud the establishment?

And let’s not forget, that unlike Apple, Facebook laid down beaucoup bucks, double digit billions for the lack of income WhatsApp and the burgeoning Instagram. Credit Zuck for making good bets. For taking a risk. For knowing that you’ve always got to stay in front of your competitors online, however few those might be…

Facebook has become an institution. Like the radio chains of yore, it’s got AM and FM, the original service and Instagram. You built your life there, your friends are all there and there’s no reason to go anywhere else.

So the belief that a big, unforeseen revolution is gonna happen online? A tsunami from left field that’s gonna blow us away? Ain’t gonna happen, that’s all in the rearview mirror. The internet has been carved up and distributed.

And Facebook rules.

Mud Slide Slim – Spotify

I’ve got no idea what this song is about. Oh, I could apply my collegiate interpretive skills and come up with some stuff, tell you what certain phrases mean, but really it’s as impressionistic to me as a late nineteenth century French painting with as much obfuscation as a Picasso.

Most people think “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” is James Taylor’s second album. And for most purposes, it was. The first available so briefly on Apple Records before it disappeared. But I always preferred the original take of “Carolina In My Mind” and I love the segues and come on, “Circle ‘Round The Sun,” even back then it reminded me of the majesty of life, the power of interpersonal relationships.

But “Sweet Baby James” was simpler. Like an art restorer had scrubbed away the accoutrements and only the essence was left. And who could predict it would be such a gigantic hit. You see at that point, singer-songwriters did not dominate the hit parade. And it wasn’t like JT worked with rappers on the side, wrote hits for pop acts, he was just doing his own thing by his lonesome and it clicked.

Not that they didn’t know they had something special.

And the most special song on that second album for me was “Country Road,” do you know even Al Kooper did a cover? Al could always pick the tracks.

But “Country Road,” it took numerous plays for the title track to sink in, even though the references to the Berkshires puts “Sweet Baby James” over the top for me now. Yet the first cut that resonated was the one before the closer on side one, “Country Road.” I guess I just like those songs that could never be a hit, that were never shooting for that, those that pick you up and take you somewhere, grab your hand, get you to stand up and walk into the wilderness, kinda like “Take Me To The Pilot” off of Elton John’s first (really second!) album, “Your Song” was the hit, but I loved the romp that came thereafter. Eventually I got into “The King Must Die” and “Sixty Years On,” but what made me an Elton John fan was “Take Me To The Pilot,” I used to live to drop the needle on that in my dorm room, it just shot lightning through my body, made me feel powerful, like the guy on this disc and me were on the same page, I was always looking to belong, I was always looking for my tribe.

Walk on down
Walk on down
Walk on down

This was back when we saved our money for stereos and guitars. We adjusted the speed of the turntable to the LP and then we figured out the chords, “Country Road” was one of the songs I could play and sing, I had a big yellow legal pad of the songs I’d figured out, my own personal fake book.

And then came “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon.”

Am I the only person who loves “Love Has Brought Me Around”? No one ever mentions it, but I got it from the very first play and did not love “You’ve Got A Friend,” although I did cotton to Carole King’s iteration, with her banging her hands on the piano like she meant it.

Now this was back when you had to buy an album to hear it. Before they decided to sell LPs by making it a value proposition, of multiple hit singles. No, you were a fan and you laid down your money, broke the shrinkwrap and found out what you got.

Now one of my favorite JT songs is on the second side of “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon.” That cut is “You Can Close Your Eyes,” which is billed a a lullaby, a tale from an oldster to a young ‘un, but that’s not how I ever saw it, I saw it as the words of someone world-weary, a traveler who’s stopping by just this night and is worn down and exasperated but after a few drinks and a few smokes reveals the bond that you shared and always will. Isn’t it great when an old friend connects? You used to see each other every day, now it’s much rarer than that, but the connection is palpable, it’s what you live for, it’s what makes life worth living.

And then there’s the next cut, “Machine Gun Kelly,” with its spoken intro and studio talk and hypnotic groove, we read about this one in advance, in “Rolling Stone,” the burgeoning music press, and unlike the Eagles’ “Desperado” soon to come it was less a hearkening back to what once was than a modern tale with a criminal moniker. Listening is like being in the first grade, maybe second, remember singing in rounds? Remembering singing at all?

I’d ask you if you remembered laughter, but this was after the misfire of “Led Zeppelin III,” ZOSO was yet to come.

And when I bought the CD, which was one of my initial digital purchases, I used to program three tracks ad infinitum, and the third was “Riding On The Railroad.” Travel used to be the American Pastime, getting in your car with the journey being more important than the destination, before flight was de rigueur and you could be anywhere in a matter of hours, go to a football game out of state on a whim. Now no one ever moves, but they fly all kinds of places. Used to be we didn’t fly hardly at all, it was too expensive, but moving was something we did on a regular basis. Ask a baby boomer how many apartments he’s lived in. We went away to college and never thought about returning home, we led peripatetic lives and lord only knows how we ended up where we did. No, that’s wrong, I ended up in California because of the music, because of the Beach Boys.

Now there are other good tracks on “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon,” most especially the second side opener “Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox,” and “Places In My Past” and “Long Ago And Far Away,” but the one going through my brain at the kitchen table was “Mud Slide Slim.”

Snippets were floating through my mind…

I’ve been letting the time go by
Letting the time go by

Have I? And what does this mean anyway? Should he speed up or slow down? I wonder this all the time. Do I stop and smell the roses or buckle down?

‘Cause there’s nothing like
The sound of sweet soul music
To change a young lady’s mind

That’s what they were, young ladies. I remember my dad insisting the letters I sent to girls being addressed MISS! All our music had boys and girls, men and women, we were all looking for a relationship, we had our long hair and bell bottoms, our look, we were just waiting for someone to open their heart to us, in the meantime all we had were these records.

I’m gonna cash in my hand and
Pick up on a piece of land
And build myself a cabin back in the woods

This was during the Back To The Land movement. After the tumult of the sixties, the failures of the Movement, people wanted to check out, leave the metropolis, bake their own bread and experience nature. Just imagine, with no internet!

Mud Slide, I’m depending upon you
Mister Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon

Who am I depending upon? The older I get the more I realize you can only depend upon yourself. I’ve met too many famous people to believe they’re vessels for our hopes and dreams, they’re flawed just like you and me. But once or maybe twice, or if truly talented even thrice, they channeled genius, and their works still survive. It’s funny, no one wants to watch the movies of yore, never mind the TV shows, but the music, we’re still listening.

And when I listen I feel whole.

I’ve been in a spot where I can’t eat, I can’t sleep and then when my brain started singing “Mud Slide Slim” I realized that was my escape, my ticket out, to put on the record and…

Groove.