Publicity is nearly irrelevant and the means of spreading the word are at your fingertips.
CHALLENGE
Making money.
REWARD
Successful artists are making more money in adjusted dollars than they ever were, just not as much as bankers or techies. Furthermore, there are many avenues of revenue. Endorsements, merch, privates…and live pays better than ever before.
CHALLENGE
Only Top Forty counts/can make you go nuclear.
REWARD
We’re disruption ready. Radio will embrace the left field, the public wants it, if you can do something different well, you can break through. But you must be persistent.
CHALLENGE
Takes forever for a track to move up the chart.
REWARD
You can continue to release new music for no cost on YouTube and nearly no cost on streaming services to satiate your fans and bond them to you.
CHALLENGE
You’re competing against the history of music/greatest music of all time.
REWARD
Separates the men from they boys (and the women from the girls!) If you’re not good enough, drop out. And ignore those not good enough. Today you have to have a great voice and great tunes. The bar is ever higher, but if you can reach it…
CHALLENGE
Fake news.
REWARD
Art is about truth, ignore the hype. Don’t feel bad when someone else gets a review in the “Times” and you don’t, it doesn’t matter!
CHALLENGE
You can’t get booked.
REWARD
Festivals need undercards. Believe me, Bowie, Blondie and a whole host of acts could have broken out of festivals. Not only does your performance/music have to be good, you have to have a show, you must assault the audience, wow people.
CHALLENGE
You can’t get paid.
REWARD
Unless you make Top Forty music you don’t need a label and streaming services pay regularly and fairly. You can make 70 cents on the dollar if you own your rights. Ignore the old farts with their disinformation campaigns decrying progress. They just want to suck at the tit of the old record company CD paradigm which is not coming back.
CHALLENGE
Record labels rip you off.
REWARD
Not for long, new systems employed by millennials are coming online. They believe in transparency. A boomer cries peace and love and stabs you in the back a millennial will pay you your cash as long as they make some.
CHALLENGE
Getting on Letterman.
REWARD
Late night is meaningless. But YouTube is your tool, and it’s FREE! It’s better than MTV.
CHALLENGE
Being heard.
REWARD
Go back to the basics, the Beatles could sing, write songs with changes and looked good to boot. Adele sells ten times what everybody else does, because she focuses on songs and melody and she can sing!
CHALLENGE
Me-too business.
REWARD
Don’t work with the usual suspects, do it your own way, the means of production are at your fingertips, experiment, failure is forgotten, keep striving for the stars, see what resonates.
Oh to be young again, when eyesight was good and hearing was up to par and…
I didn’t need moisturizer and didn’t have to refrain from long showers and…
Used to be the dry air did not bother me, certainly not on the east coast. Then again, winter is the time of colds and being cold, but with the temperature drop comes hot chocolate and skiing and internal reflection and…
Now I live in Southern California where it rarely rains and never gets cold and dampness is out of the question, never mind bugs. That’s how you know you’re dealing with a real Southern Californian, when they start to complain about bugs. Come to Cape Cod in the spring, when the screen door is covered with mosquitoes, go to Maine, the home of beautiful landscapes and no-see-ums that can sneak through the holes in your bug netting. Yup, when I was in high school I went on a canoe trip down the Allagash, we walked around in our bug hats and with our good eyesight, not needing reading glasses, we could see the no-see-ums breaking in ready to get us. And what bug spray really works. Remember that old 6-12, what crap that was, Off! was a breakthrough, but it barely worked any better. In Maine we got these tiny bottles of citronella, the insects were scared of the smell, they stayed away, and so did humans.
And you know how you itch with a bug bite? My whole body feels that way now. Forget the internet, all that digital disruption, what I want is a machine that scratches my body 24/7, gently but firmly, to relieve me of this terrible condition.
It comes every fall. Sometime around October. And I’ve been to the skin doctor…
Did anybody ever tell you that dermatology is more art than science? Go to an orthopedist and they’ll set your leg, it’ll heal and you’ll be as good as new. Go to a dermatologist and they’ll prescribe a zillion ointments that don’t work even though they say they do and they’ll keep giving you more until you give up and stop going.
At least that’s what happened to me.
I’ve got this condition on my nose. It’s scaling. I look like a junior W.C. Fields. So I went to the big time skin doctor and he gave me medications…
And they didn’t work.
But boy did he service me. Told me to call. We bonded over celebrities we knew. We discussed politics. But my skin condition did not go away.
And then it spread to my head. Google me, I don’t have any hair up there. But I do now have red splotches. And that requires a different juice, but if I put it on before I go to bed doesn’t it get all over the pillow, and normally I sleep on my stomach but I still haven’t fully recovered from my shoulder surgery but I can now roll on my side and if the pillow is infected with the head stuff will I lick it and die? Did I tell you I have OCD? You know now!
And then I went to Colorado. And I was fine in Aspen, but then I got to Vail and…
My skin went nuclear.
Was it the dryness or the long underwear or…
I stopped using the Under Armour 3.0, which you need when it gets close to zero. I’m lathering my body with AmLactin, but I live for that moment in the shower, when I can turn the water blistering hot and have it shoot onto my skin and relieve me. Truly. As hot as it will go. That’s how you know you’ve got it bad, when you get relief from scalding H20. But showers are the worst thing for your skin, they deplete the natural oils. The dermatologist said to try and skip them. But after skiing? What about at physical therapy? There’s nothing worse than a body that smells. You can rarely smell yourself, but others can. And it horrifies them. Hell, I’ve searched for years for the right deodorant. But now my skin is so bad that the deodorant is giving me the itchies, I researched online and ultimately purchased Clinique and it’s better, but it’s still a problem. Can I tell you that on the weekends when I’m not going out in public I don’t use it? There, I did.
But go to a meeting or a doctor’s appointment or a movie without taking a shower right before? Never gonna happen. Those people who wash their hair every once in a while, those who never wash their jeans… Boy are you self-confident. I wash what hair I have every day, as for my jeans, life is tough enough already, interpersonal relationships are challenging, I’m not gonna risk smelling bad. Shirts get one day and one day only. When I read online about these women who reject men because they stink…
Kinda like the men who ghost you. I guess women do that too. But it’s usually men who behave badly, but not me, assuming I make the entreaty to begin with, assuming I can handle the rejection of you saying no.
So then it spread to my chest. And my legs. And I go back to the skin doctor and he mumbles some mumbo-jumbo, some technical term, and is barely concerned. Keeps telling me to call. Ups the strength of the ointment, but doesn’t understand my desperation, my pain.
So I give up.
I go to Ireland, it’s damp and my condition improves.
I go to Vail and I wear my decades old Patagonia underwear, too heavy for the conditions but my skin doesn’t get worse.
But then I make a mistake. After swimming in the Patagonia in Sun Valley, I switch back to the Hot Chillys and…
Come on, just one day?
Now my whole body’s got the heebie-jeebies.
And I don’t understand how you cope if you’re not in a relationship, who’s gonna treat your back, you can’t reach it! And the truth is in our independent society you need a partner, otherwise it’s just too rough. All those single people boasting about their lifestyle, they’re kind of like the childless, talking about being footloose and fancy-free. But who’s gonna visit you in the old age home, take care of you? Not your distant relatives, although there are saints, you need a close blood relation to put up with your crap, as you crankily lose it but hang on before leaving this mortal coil.
You think you want to live forever…
Believe me, you don’t. Who’re you gonna talk to? Who knows Howdy Doody, never mind Moochie and Ernie Kovacs. Hell, they changed the mascot at my high school, you think things are forever and then you go back home and find out they tore your house down. This ain’t Europe, nothing’s forever in America, certainly not in Los Angeles.
And I’m not a girl. I don’t spend time primping. Maybe I should, but I see it as a waste of time. Along with shopping and watching most TV. Especially now, there’s so much I want to do and see, it’s overwhelming, who can be bored, who can burn time? But now I have to, to slather on ointments all over my body, otherwise I can’t sleep.
And I’m scaling inside my ears and behind them and I’m just waiting for spring to come. To relieve me of this condition. My body looks like a battle zone, a war map, with marks from previous campaigns.
They’re busting my balls in Sun Valley, for not going into the hot tub. But if I go into a hot tub I’ll be itching for weeks, truly! I’ve experimented. You don’t want to believe your life is limited.
And what exactly is the biology here. How come it’s worse when you get older.
And am I the only person suffering? That can’t be.
But I’m sitting in the car, listening to Gary Dell’Abate do comedy on AXS TV and Howard’s poking fun at him and I can’t turn it off because I’m too busy scratching the itch, all over my lower legs.
And it’s all about the human condition. They tell you it’s about accumulating wealth but the truth is it’s all about your health. You learn this as you age. All the people no longer here, who used to call me on the phone, not only my dad but Chip Hooper, and those who couldn’t take it and ended their lives prematurely like my old friend Robert, life is about loss and it’s damn hard to cope with but the truth is life ain’t worth living if you’re not healthy.
But you’re young and you’re smoking and drinking and drugging like you’re immune.
You’re not. And one day you’ll end up an old fart just like me, minding your own business and then enduring afflictions you didn’t see on the horizon, that make your life miserable, and you’ll cope for a while and then take action and then become resigned…
This is how it’s gonna be from now on.
(Sorry, I had to take a break to scratch my clavicle…)
You’re going to soldier on in silent desperation as your body withers and…
Are you with me?
I think so. We all fight our silent demons. This is mine.
As for Coachella, despite the press of it being America’s greatest festival, the truth is it’s a rite of passage for Southern California teenagers, where you put on your outfit and take selfies, they should rename it INSTAGRAMELLA, because it’s got little to do with the music and all to do with the attendees. And I give the promoters credit, they’ve finally woken up to this fact, albeit far too late, booking Beyonce, now replaced by Gaga, and Kendrick Lamar, if they really had it together they’d have booked Bieber, years ago, because he is now credible and the favorite of those who actually go to this show, although most of them will be high in the Sahara Tent, listening to deejays. The undercard? No one’s broken out of Coachella, any damn festival at all, for eons, if at all. It’s a circle jerk, akin to a booking at SXSW. You used to go from nowhere to somewhere by appearing, now you still stay nowhere, unless there’s a big push on you anyway and the festival is just icing on the cake.
But this Arroyo Seco Weekend…
The first canard is that Coachella is such a beautiful site, on the polo fields. Wrong. It’s a barren landscape with a few rides and sculptures that can be way too hot and way too windy and the truth is the biggest festivals in America, other than gross, the best planned and most fun to attend, are Lollapalooza and ACL right in the heart of the city. Kind of like the granddaddy, Jazz Fest, which ends in the early evening so everybody can shuttle back to town and eat!
And for those who went to Desert Trip, what they could not stop talking about was the food. The concert experience has flip-flopped. You used to be satisfied being treated like cattle, eating hot dogs and popcorn, now you want respect, and the lineup of eateries involved with Arroyo Seco makes one interested in going irrelevant of the acts on stage.
Food is more interesting than music right now, MTV is no longer called “Music Television” while the Food Channel continues to burgeon and everybody on it has a restaurant and brand extensions. Because chefs take risks, they don’t play it safe, something musicians have lost sight of.
As for the headliners at Desert Trip, other than maybe Neil Young, they’re all past they’re sell date. McCartney’s voice has withered, Dylan’s is near-nonexistent, Roger Waters never sang much to begin with, and although the Stones and the Who are experiencing renaissances, with the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band firing on all cylinders and Roger Daltrey taking time off between gigs to rest his voice, you can see them anywhere and everywhere, as for the Who’s recently announced Las Vegas residency, positively brilliant. The road kills bands, why not have the audience come to them. Vegas is the new Branson, for far too long it was about irrelevant shows with boobies and aged entertainers, but now it’s a mix of old and new musicians/singers and is more attractive every day, kudos.
So, Arroyo Seco, unlike Coachella, underplays. It’s not for everybody, but locals. I’m not saying out of town people and foreigners can’t attend, but the truth is every community now has its festival and by trying to be more than that you often end up with less.
Tom Petty may be from Florida, but he’s now seen as a SoCal act. As are Dawes, Fitz & The Tantrums and Weezer and…
This festival may be enhanced by the food, but first and foremost it’s positively about music. What a change from Coachella. And it’s not a notch in the belt like Desert Trip, where old fogeys go to congratulate themselves, but an enjoyable experience both seeing the headliners and those coming up. And I’m sure substances will be taken, but this is not music made inside the box, but with real instruments, played by both the old and the new, it’s refreshing, you can go and enjoy what you already know and discover new bands. This festival is more in touch with the audience than any record company, playing to radio and the lowest common denominator listener, Arroyo Seco is about the AUDIENCE!
And the audience is segmented. Arroyo Seco writes off the baby boomers, if they want to come, cool, but really it’s about the Generation after, X, which is fifty give or take. But it does not write off their younger brethren, still stimulated by music that in many cases gets no airplay.
And I cannot ignore the food, but this is the first festival in a long time that is about the music, not the site, not the aura. You see the lineup, note it’s in Pasadena, and say I WANT TO GO!
Mike Ginsberg turned me on to Traffic. I met him at a NEFTY week in New Hampshire. I took the train up to West Hartford and we sat in his attic and he spun the second LP, the one that started with “Feelin’ Alright,” long before Joe Cocker made this song so famous. And then the band blew apart.
It wasn’t like it is today, there was no Wikipedia, we couldn’t figure out whether Dave was in the band on the first album or a roadie and then they were three once again and Dave went on to play with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, who’d recorded before but broke through when Eric Clapton sat in and they put out the album “On Tour.” And the track that got all the traction from that LP was “Comin’ Home,” with the soon to be Derek’s guitarwork, but the standout cut was one “Only You Know And I Know,” with Delaney and Bonnie trading lead vocals, but dedicated credit readers knew the song was composed by one Dave Mason, and just a few months later, in the spring of ’70, Dave put out his own solo LP on Blue Thumb entitled “Alone Together.”
Now we’d never heard of Blue Thumb.
Most people had never even heard of Dave Mason.
And that’s where I first came across Tommy LiPuma, he produced one of the best rock albums of all time, just check it out, it starts with “Only You Know And I Know.”
It’s the same song as on the Delaney & Bonnie LP, not a radically different arrangement, but it’s in the pocket, a hit in a way its predecessor is not.
Now “Alone Together” was a paragon of packaging. With panels that folded out to reveal a portrait of Dave in front of rocks that you could hang on the wall, with a hole for a pin or nail on top, and encased in the pocket was a record that looked like an hallucination, as if rocky road and vanilla and strawberry had all run together and… It resembled nothing so much as one of those spin paintings you make at the elementary school carnival.
And then you dropped the needle.
Now they made records differently back then. Stereo effects were in, as was separation, how something sounded was key, because we were all buying new stereos the way people bought new computers in the nineties, but rather than want to commune with our brothers online we wanted to bask in the tunes.
And “Alone Together” is the first LP I played when I heard Tommy LiPuma died last night.
Now this is completely strange. Because for the last couple of years it was Tommy weighing in on the deceased. Most recently with Leon Russell. Weird when the chronicler disappears, it leaves a vacuum, and I don’t think I can fill it.
But I knew him.
Mostly in e-mail.
In person at MusiCares.
And most people get old. Or they try too hard to be young. But Tommy… He was aged in years, but in spirit he was still in the pocket, he knew about the technology, but first and foremost he knew the music, he’d been bitten by the bug way back when.
As were we.
It’s hard for the younger generations to understand, what music meant to us. The Beatles were our Facebook.
Only bigger.
FM radio was our internet.
Everybody bought a guitar, everybody played.
And we knew who everybody was.
Which is why Tommy LiPuma stood out. He was not one of the usual suspects, one of the producers du jour, not Felix Pappalardi from Cream, not George Martin from the Beatles, but he birthed an album so exquisite, with each track playable, that you knew he was gonna be a legend.
And he became one.
Now Dave Mason got in a snit over money, where there’s a hit there’s a writ, and he decamped from Blue Thumb for Columbia, where he ultimately had a big radio track, 1977’s “We Just Disagree,” but he never reached the heights of “Alone Together” again, because he didn’t work with Tommy.
And the thing about Tommy is he didn’t have a signature sound, all his productions sounded different.
Prior to Mason, Tommy produced “Guantanamera” for the Sandpipers, a boomer classic if there ever was one, one they knew by heart, as did their parents.
And after Dave he produced not only Barbra Streisand, but eight tracks on Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable.”
And then he made Diana Krall a star.
And most people still have no idea who he is.
But they know his productions.
And what more can you ask for?
Only you know and I know All the love we’ve got to show
And I’m showing it for Tommy right now.
So don’t refuse to believe it By reading too many meanings
That was the era, you were supposed to lay back and take it all in, not only were nerds not lauded, aggressive business people like Mark Zuckerberg were decried. It was not about making money so much as searching for truth, and disseminating it when you found it.
‘Cause you know that I mean what I say So don’t go and take me the wrong way
So far from today’s duplicity. We’re a divided country unsure of what’s right but there was no debate way back when, you just listened to the music.
You know you can’t go on getting your own way ‘Cause if you do, it’s going to get you someday
The ethos of a musician is different from that of you and me, they’re not competitive, awards are b.s., it’s about the tunes and the journey. And if you disobey the laws of the universe you’re gonna pay someday.
I don’t mean to mislead you It’s just my craziness coming through
Mama, we were all crazy then. Now no one admits it, now image rules.
But when it comes down to just two I ain’t no crazier than you
You’re no better than me, the Woodstock Generation knew it was all in it together, we were all brothers and sisters until Reagan legitimized greed and if you don’t believe that you probably thought the Vietnam War was a good thing.
But it’s hard to believe in When you’ve been so mistreated
That’s the story of the twenty first century, the wealthy and powerful lord their position over us, tell us they know what’s right while they rip us off and leave us behind. And that’s the damn truth, that’s why Hillary couldn’t win the election, because of all that money she made selling books and giving speeches. How about us, who’s gonna look after us?
Certainly not the musicians looking to follow in the footsteps of the techies. Scratch today’s superstar and you’ll find someone invested in startups. The music just ain’t enough.
But it used to be.
When legends like Tommy LiPuma walked the earth. Bridged the gap from what once was to what became, from jazz to rock and roll and back again.
Because not only is it only rock and roll.
It’s only music.
And I mean what I say.
And when I listen to “Alone Together,” all I think of is this guy who did not change his ethnic name, who cared not about image, but delivering the truth of the artist on wax, back when producers were footnotes, literally, that we unearthed and read like Dead Sea Scrolls, and it’s been nearly fifty years and “Alone Together” remains and sustains. Will the best work of Max Martin achieve this goal?
