There’s a fiction that we all want to be doing our own thing, burrowing down into holes of our own device, satiated with a world only we control.

But the truth is we want to feel part of humanity, we want to belong, and the further we get away from the rest of our fellow human beings, the worse our state of mind.

We want to not only engage with art, we want to discuss it, argue about it. And that’s why music burgeoned in the MTV era…we could all argue about Duran Duran and Culture Club, literally everyone saw Michael Jackson thrill us with his moonwalk.

But today we know there’s Taylor Swift and Kanye West and…

Those passionate about music can’t understand those who aren’t…

And the industry itself lives in a bubble similar to the one enveloping the GOP.

Not only is the money in mass, so is the satisfaction! We all know the story of the Tower of Babel, it’s not a nursery rhyme, but rather a cautionary tale…how did we get so far from the garden?

Prior to MTV there were a number of radio formats. But then the television outlet merged them together and made a monoculture. People who were left out screamed. Suddenly AOR, the rock format, was history. Top Forty was everything… Even hip-hop invaded the Top Forty.

And then the internet came along and blew everything apart and without a manual, and with no sense of history, the industry has not only been flummoxed, it’s wandering in the wilderness with no direction home.

The future is not playlists and the future is not Beats 1.

The future is TRUSTED filters directing the audience where to partake of desirable music.

Apple Music’s playlists aren’t bad, but who made them? We live in a culture of stars, but the makers of these lists are complete unknowns, why should we trust them, why should we pay attention, is anybody listening? Until we heap praise upon list makers, drawing attention and an audience to them, we’re mired in the mud.

And Apple 1 radio is a sideshow. It’s the same damn thing we’ve seen for far too long, which is to take hip insiders and have a party that the rest of us have no desire to attend. Sure, the station has fans, but in an on demand culture, who wants to be beholden to the ravings of lunatics not appealing to them?

In other words, we watch HBO on demand.

And we watch the shows because they’re on HBO.

HBO is a trusted filter. It doesn’t add shows to fill the schedule, there’s not something new every hour. If HBO lays down its cash, we deem it important, we want to check it out.

And HBO has competitors, like Showtime and now Starz. But the truth is, after that…it’s a vast wasteland of programming looking for traction, with over 400 shows a year no one can check them all out, they have to wait for word of mouth to build, which rarely does. Shows get canceled before they get good and reach critical mass and even “Breaking Bad” takes years to become a hit.

We do live in an on demand culture. We do want to check out the wares on our own time. HBO has an app which allows you to watch its shows ON DEMAND! We can stream Beats 1, but we’re more interested in a brief Zane Lowe playlist which we can click on and sample.

So maybe Mr. Lowe is a trusted filter. At least in the U.K. He’s yet to make his bones elsewhere, and so far the hype has not achieved this goal. We haven’t learned why we should be paying attention to Mr. Lowe, his track record of breaking worthy hits, instead it’s all about his story. Story comes AFTER the work. You don’t read a profile of an unknown techie before his company goes public.

Then again, whittling down music to a few hit tunes is anathema to the labels and the musicians. Because it means most people will be left out. They like it this way, the utter chaos that has the potential audience throwing its collective hands in the air.

We will have trusted filters.

And they will be built upon the backs of human beings. Algorithms don’t work with art.

And these human beings’ work may be exposed under the moniker of the corporation, but music will only be healthy when it’s understandable, and now it is not.

We might need a playlist for every genre. But only one, that we all pay attention to.

That’s what radio has right, the playlist. Radio weeds through all the material and delivers the good stuff for its listeners… With too many commercials and jive programming. But what if you excised the deejays and ads from radio, and you didn’t have to listen all at once?

Then you’d have the future.

Like television, music is driving towards the great consolidation. Everybody can make it, but not everybody can be heard.

Businesses depend upon audiences, upon customers. If no one is buying, companies fail.

Music has been failing for over a decade.

What does tech tell us?

ATTENTION COMES FIRST! MONETIZATION COMES LATER!

All the scuttlebutt in music is what streaming services pay, instead of how many people are signing up, free or not. We’ve got it wrong. It’s not about where people are listening, BUT WHAT THEY’RE LISTENING TO!

I want to find the good stuff. I want to be able to talk about the good stuff with others. I want to go to the concert and enjoy the communal moment.

And so does everybody else.

It’s like a roller coaster, really. Not a love roller coaster, like in a Luke Bryan song, but an old wooden amusement park one, back before safety rules were strictly enforced.

It’s the organ that sets the mood. You know, when it’s finally your turn and you walk onto the platform and sit down in the car, in eager anticipation, but also fear.

And then the old wizened man chewing on a cigar pulls back the arm and the train starts to move as Carlos’s guitar starts to buzzsaw, it’s too late now, you’re off and running, it’s all out of your control.

You reach the peak and your hair is flying, you’re holding on tight, this is long before seat belt laws, and you’re having the time of your life.

Got no time for foolin’ with you baby
Your stupid game is about to end

The power of endings, when you make the decision and decide you’re going to waste no more time, you’re gonna risk, you’re gonna ride by yourself, with no hand to hold.

Santana’s initial LP only sold in the wake of Woodstock, the movie blew it up, “Evil Ways” was all over the radio, people had to hear “Soul Sacrifice.” But we were unprepared for “Abraxas.” The nude woman on the cover, the quietude of the instrumentals, the just rightness of “Oye Como Va,” the hit of “Black Magic Woman,” but my favorite cut was always “Mother’s Daughter.

I woke up with a Luke Bryan song in my head, “Way Way Back,” but it wasn’t until thinking about the Fillmore book and pulling up “Abraxas” that I experienced the true power of music, to completely change your mood.

I listened to “Incident At Neshabur,” and then I pushed the button on my headphones until I heard the mellifluous sound of “Mother’s Daughter.”

I was brought back to fall at Middlebury, when I was a freshman and the air was changing, the heat was leaving us, and this emanated from the dorm room of Muddy Waters, this is when I finally realized I liked Santana.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard “Mother’s Daughter” on the radio. But that’s how it was back then, the album tracks were just as important, when being a professional musician was a high bar few crossed, and when you did, when you got your major label deal, we checked you out and if you were worthy we devoured your music, played it ad infinitum, it was all we had.

It’s all we’ve got.

Mother’s Daughter – Spotify

Mother’s Daughter – YouTube

“Live at the Fillmore East and West: Getting Backstage and Personal with Rock’s Greatest Legends”

What people don’t understand is classic rock was a revolution, populated by the disenfranchised, hungry to have fun and make a difference. To think that these degenerates could conquer the world and lead a nation was anathema to the powers-that-be, the same way they were confounded by the nerds who took over the world with tech in the twenty first century.

Janis Joplin was an outcast looking for acceptance who never got it until she demonstrated her greatness and made it. Then it killed her.

Carlos Santana was a street urchin from Tijuana who would still be an unknown if it weren’t for Bill Graham.

Grace Wing was a rich girl’s daughter, who thrived on the privilege and then deemed it necessary to test limits, whiplashing her band and the entire nation in the process.

And we ate it all up. We went to the Fillmore and then Woodstock. Money started to rain. And then cocaine flew up everybody’s noses and the entire scene matured and has never been the same.

I don’t expect anyone under thirty to read this book. Because they believe that they’re in charge and the world is their oyster. But in the fifties and early sixties this was not the case. Kids were subservient. The old white men ruled. You were afraid of your mom and dad, they weren’t your best friends.  And then we heard the music.

It didn’t start in the suburbs. There was no internet, never mind cable TV. If you didn’t live in the metropolis, if you weren’t within earshot of the city airwaves, you were out of the loop, a year or two behind. By time the band was on Ed Sullivan there was a whole new crop of acts the cognoscenti were into. But you didn’t know them. There was no social media, the newspaper was everything, and even if the newspaper reported, young people did not read it, it was for the oldsters.

And then came the radio.

This book barely focuses on the recording side of the equation, which has been lauded ad infinitum. This is all about the gig, the live performance, where most of these acts made their bones. The Beatles started live, as did Joplin, Santana, the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead, all of whose careers are profiled herein. They were outsider musicians, back when you could survive on a few dollars a week, when life was about opportunities instead of closed doors.

There are so many inaccuracies and misspellings in this book you’ll be horrified.

But you’ll also learn inside details you never knew.

Bill Graham was making the lion’s share of the dough, but he built the scene, there were no concomitant promoters to compete with him until the acts could sell themselves. Which is how they ended up with ninety percent of the gross. You can count the number of people in attendance, you cannot count how many records have been shipped, stolen or bought. The record company kept that info private, and still does. But the rubber meets the road at the gig. And that’s where the fire is lit. All these acts made it based on their performances, most significantly at Woodstock.

You’ve got no idea how big the movie and attendant triple album were. Sure, the Beatles may have conquered America, but they were safe, Brian Epstein cleaned them up. No one cleaned up Janis Joplin or Grace Slick or Carlos Santana. And when you saw them perform you wanted so much more.

And they didn’t give a fuck. Sure, they liked the money. But they could offend the audience, they were on their own trip. And it was so different from today.

I wasn’t planning on reading this book. But going through a pile of what was sent to me I uncovered it and got hooked. Every night I couldn’t put it down. I went down the rabbit hole to what once was and will never be again.

You see the scene was nascent, no one knew what was happening, and then the worm turned and it hasn’t been the same since. Kinda like the web was for exploration, before pop-up ads and all kinds of shenanigans made it lucrative for the usual suspects. If you were surfing in 1995 you remember the naked women tracking their every move, the people detailing their lives, it wasn’t about money so much as self-fulfillment and exhibitionism.

And there’s a healthy dose of exhibitionism in rock and roll.

You can make music. You can make money.

But you cannot become one of the richest people in the world. To do that, you had to play music in the sixties and seventies. When fans gave the acts all their dough. Because without music life was empty. Hit singles counted, but where you were going was more important than staying still.

Albert Grossman tried to get Janis Joplin clean. Bill Graham did a great job of managing the Airplane. But the musicians didn’t want to listen. They wanted to be free, to their detriment, Paul Kantner admits this.

But it was this specific middle finger to the powers-that-be, to the establishment, that made them so attractive.

Don Henley was right, we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.

But if you want to know what it was like, read this book.

They say we should listen to “24 Frames,” but if you do so you’ll get an appreciation of Jason Isbell equivalent to the one of Ryan Adams if you listen to “New York, New York.”

That’s right, they were both in bands that didn’t work out for them and went solo and suddenly got acclaim, Ryan Adams on an indie label with “Heartbreaker,” with its masterpiece “My Winding Wheel.” But if you listen to “Gold,” the follow-up, you’ll discover “New York, New York” was one of the weakest songs on the LP. an album-opening ditty made to appeal to the casual listener, and neither Adams nor Isbell is for those driving by, they’re for the cognoscenti, the diehard fan. But labels are flummoxed and they point to the catchy tune when anyone who believes knows that the track on “Gold” is the slow burner “Nobody Girl,” and the track on Jason Isbell’s “Something More Than Free” is “Speed Trap Town,” a song that no one writes about that stopped me in my tracks when I was listening to it way past midnight in the Santa Monica Mountains.

We’re looking for something human, that touches us, that helps us make sense of this complicated world, that makes us feel not so alone. But the music business has given up on this paradigm, it’s just too difficult, because if you take the non-pop road you’ve got to deliver on an “A” level, you can’t fake it if you want to survive. But for those of us who live for the sound, who are waiting to be soothed and made to feel life is worth living, these are the tracks we’re looking for, the ones that cannot be categorized that ooze truth and the whole ball of wax we call life.

Well it’s a Thursday night, but there’s a high school game

That’s what you do when you live in nowheresville, go to high school sports, even though you’ve graduated and you no longer care, if you ever did. But there are so few options. Thank god for the internet, used to be the small town was literally death for those who stayed, emotional, if not physical. If only you could get up the gumption to leave…

Sneak a bottle up the bleachers and forget my name

The boonies will make you an alcoholic. I know, I lived there. There’s nothing to do. First you drink for the excitement, then you drink to get away from your everyday life, and then you drink in the hope of having the greatest night of your life and when you wake up hung over the next morning having failed in your quest the depression is so overpowering all you can do is lie in bed with the phone turned off and wait for the darkness.

And it never did occur to me to leave ’til tonight

I always wanted to get out. From my hometown. From Middlebury, Vermont. I wanted to go where nobody knew my name and I could continue to be anonymous unless I happened to do something great. The smaller the town the more people you know, but the harder it is to escape from your branding, the preconception everybody formed of you on Day One, however inaccurate.

And there’s no one left to ask if I’m all right

That’s when the wind of loneliness blows hardest, when you’re needy and you discover there’s no one who cares. You go to school and everybody’s down your throat, telling you what to do, and then you graduate and no one cares about you, you’ve aged out, you’ve become an adult, even though you still feel like a child.

The doctor said Daddy wouldn’t make it a year
But the holidays are over and he’s still here

He’s conflicted. He loves his dad but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to abandon him but he wants him to be gone. But it keeps dragging on. He’s looking for the release of being an orphan, of being free, that’s what they don’t tell you about losing a parent, as sad as it is there’s an incredible sense of freedom, you can finally grow up and do what you want, without judgment.

He didn’t care about us when he was walking around
Just pulling women over in a speed trap town

How do you square the biology with the practicality? When your loved ones are not like those depicted on television. Life is chiaroscuro but too often it’s portrayed as black and white. And until you gain the confidence to know that everybody is insecure, has more questions than answers, you feel inadequate.

I’ll sleep until I’m straight enough to drive, then decide
If there’s anything that can’t be left behind

The truth is you can leave it all behind, but you’re scared of being that naked and free, without anyone to bounce off of, to complain about. Too many stay because they’re too scared to leave. But you’ve got to go, you’ve got to save yourself.

The road got blurry when the sun came up
So I slept a couple hours in the pickup truck
Drank a cup of coffee by an Indian mound
A thousand miles away from that speed trap town
A thousand miles away from that speed trap town

What did James Taylor sing, “There’s nothing like a hundred miles between me and trouble in my mind”? But that was back in ’76, when we looked to singers for answers, before the dash for cash made our country coarser, before the artists started telling us how much better they were than us, before we stopped looking to music for answers.

And I’m not sure there are any answers in “Speed Trap Town,” on all of “Something More Than Free,” but the truth is even Bob Dylan was confused, he could only sing what he saw and hope that we resonated.

We did.

And I resonate with “Speed Trap Town.”

And truly, the words are secondary. It’s more about the sound. The spareness. That loping acoustic guitar providing the rhythm, that electric guitar wailing in pain, “Speed Trap Town” sounds like the prairie, sounds like somewhere barren, which we know everything about even if we’ve never left the city, because we’ve all experienced emotional barrenness. And that’s when we turn to music.

I don’t know what happens to the music industry, hell, I don’t know what happens to our country, with income inequality and global warming, but I do know I’m looking for a needle in a haystack.

And in this case I’ve found one.

Don’t let the relentless hype turn you off.

Jason Isbell is not that good. Steve Earle’s “Guitar Town” is a classic, “Something More Than Free” is not. But back when Steve cut that nailing the experience with an acoustic guitar and some words was a goal, like writing the Great American Novel in the fifties, now music is mostly about getting rich, which leaves Jason Isbell as a party of one. Sure, there are others doing his act, just nowhere near as well. But if we all listened to “Speed Trap Town” and saw Isbell’s path as viable…

Maybe Jason had nothing more to lose. He wasn’t on the fast track. He could take risks. Which is why our greatest art rarely comes from the educated and privileged, who usually play it safe. Jason Isbell is risking it all, he doesn’t care what we think.

Which is why we care so much.

Rhinofy-Speed Trap Town